GivingMarket/SmallChange

Small is beautiful... and Powerful! Here are some small-scale changes, shifts, actions and mechanisms that drive the GivingMarket...

/LittleIndividual?

The costs of organization-making and funding-finding is high, often higher than the costs of actually doing the work that would make the world or a community or even a few people better off. This GivingMarket is proposed to be about /SmallChange, small projects, small changes, small change as in not a lot of money required, and about individuals helping individuals help individuals. People to people. Small Change. Human Scale. Pick up the phone. Send a check. Make a referral. Post the news personally in a weblog. Read the news. Track the progress. Visit. Shake hands. Personal gifts offered in local communities and simple projects, funded by personal gifts from people who will stay connected, pay attention, get involved. It's an extension of the shift that has given rise to a wave of individual investors who make their own financial decisions, armed with a few tools from discount brokers. In this market place, individual organizers will plan projects for themselves and individual donors will decide for themselves which of these projects and people are really valuable. No organizational power brokers to come in between willing resources and ready action. Individual action is about making small changes that one or a few people can get started on their own.

Lower Costs

Yahoo Groups didn't make mass emailing possible, it made it more easy and efficient for non-tech individuals. Ebay didn't make garage sales, basement retailing, collectibles marketing possible, it made them more easy and efficient. Blogging didn't make web publishing possible. Google News didn't make reading 1000 different newspapers and websites possible. Again, just more easy and efficient. In this way, a GivingMarket need not make giving or even online giving possible, it only needs to make it easy and efficient for individuals -- for ordinary people who are not familiar with website-building tools, planned giving, non-profit management, tax law, estate planning and other areas required to run social service or giving organizations. Easy means more individuals could be visioning, organizing, fundraising and giving. Efficiency means lower transactions costs. More and more smaller giving transactions provide funding for more and more small changes to the good.

Short Stories

A simple set of templates for describing projects and giving interests would help both buyers and sellers, project organizers and resource givers, clarify their plans and interests and conditions. A ticker template could report movement in the market. An agreements template would facilitate clear transactions. A project request template could lead project organizers through assets identification and project description process. A weblog template would help organizers report progress. A dashboard template could help givers track projects of interest. Templates means the small change of marrying existing templates and structures in order to help individuals request, report, recognize and support individual stories about how the world can move in small positive directions right now.

Pennies per Dollar

The owners of a bureaucratic hierarchy take an equity stake in the assets of the organization, the nodes where production takes place. The owner of a network owns the connections that run between the nodes. The owner of a market doesn't own or control the production or the delivery of the goods and services traded. The market maker owns a little piece of every transaction that takes place in that market. The airline owns the planes, the alliance owns the marketing names and computer systems that connect and cross-book flights, but the airport owns the space where they all come and go, taking a small fee for every passenger. In a GivingMarket, that little slice of payment might come in the form of attention to banner advertising (yahoogroups, google), membership fees (match.com), or a commission on each payment (eBay, paypal). Somehow, each click generates a little bit of income that can support the maker of the market itself. This is about small changes aligning with and adding up to much larger movements.

Upticks

Employees of large firms, members of local community, small business owners, webloggers, stock market investors, online daters, or individual purchasers, people are familiar with movement in markets. Bringing personal initiative and philanthropic giving to the fore as a marketplace in which anyone with a few extra dollars and an ounce of real concern can participate, is something that a world of shoppers and sellers and websurfers can understand. The steady stream of upticks and downticks -- are the small moment-to-moment changes that move major markets and whole economies, one bid, one ask, one sale at a time. Every tick is a sale, every sale a price, and every price a new piece of information. Every ask and offer, update and comment, is a tick that moves the GivingMarket.

Small Wins

The small changes in a GivingMarket -- a daily flow of givers bidding, project blogging, and benefits reporting -- should be as irresistable as sports scores, email inbox, horoscopes and stock tickers. Humans are hardwired to notice and look for novelty, small movements and changes that might be something -- think hunting or driving, bargain shopping or value investing. Tiny differences make a big difference. This marketplace will offer a steady flow of small changes -- small wins -- for the common good.