Everyone’s heard of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) such as the Red Cross or Oxfam, but fewer people are aware that the long tail of NGOs adds up to 1.5 million entities in the United State alone
According to Kamran Elahian, co-chair of of UNGAID and co-founder of Global Catalyst Partners, smaller organizations across the world are doing amazing work but lack a global voice.
But Elahian plans to give smaller NGOs that voice through Umovement, part of his plan to “democratize the world of philanthropy.”
“It’s a grassroots movement to allow any non-profit organization, any NGO, any individual which has any project in any part of the world that help [the] UN MDGs to achieve their goals, to be introduced on this site and to use web 2.0, web 3.0 technlogies to get promoted.”
Elahian, while onstage at Mashable and 92Y’s UN Week Digital Media Lounge Thursday, estimated that there are 20 million NGOs worldwide that could benefit from a centralized, Wikipedia-like website that could serve as a hub of information as well as ease the donation process.
The site is organized under goals such as ending poverty or reducing child mortality and is completely free for any organization to use. Each NGO is given a uniform landing page designed to give brief overviews of their projects and links to donate or volunteer. Further, Elahian is banking on the power of crowdsourcing, much like Wikipedia, to breed success. Organizations or their individual projects can be rated or commented on by any user. Rather than police the success of individual projects, Elahian believes that their base of users will help monitor and promote the most successful or important causes.
The site also hopes to make social media more accessible to smaller organizations by providing a “Uki,” a banner to promote specific projects that can be embedded nearly anywhere, and other tools to maximize social networks, including Facebook and Twitter. Also, the site operates in 50 different languages using an automatic translator. While the resulting translations might not be “the work of Shakespeare,” according to Elahian, it will go far to expanding the scope of the site.
Watch the above interview for a deeper look at how Umovement plans to reinvigorate the NGO space and level the playing field for charities across the world, and let us know what you think of this project in the comments.
More About: kamran elahian, mdg, mdg goals, ngo, non-profit, umovement, UN week, un week digital media lounge, United Nations
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