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You also have to take into account the amount of time it would take for PIH to deal with direct contributions. It's a non-trivial problem for these organization
by nowarninglabel 14y ago
You also have to take into account the amount of time it would take for PIH to deal with direct contributions. It's a non-trivial problem for these organizations to focus on that aspect when their core competency is to focus on the medical work they do. We've seen this a lot at Kiva where our partners are able to do things they could not have done otherwise because we are providing a source of funds that they don't have to devote resources towards, allowing for reaching new regions, providing different loan terms (for instance "bullet" loans for agriculture that pay off at the end and can be difficult for a small MFI to deal with), and for reach new groups of people with services, such as the completely unbanked.
That said Partners in Health seems to be a fairly robust organization and seems to have the donation handling and web presence problem solved, but Watsi is still providing a place to evangelize them to people who would otherwise never come across them.
- andrewem 14y agoSpeaking of Kiva, is Watsi going to need volunteer translators? Kiva has a great program where people volunteer to translate loan applications into English, and excellent infrastructure to support it. (My wife has been a Kiva translator for a long time, and might be interested in translating for Watsi, since she specializes in Spanish to English medical documents.)
- nowarninglabel 14y agoOh what a coincide! I work on the software, Viva, that the volunteer translators use at Kiva :)
- andrewem 14y agoNice! Have you considered open sourcing Viva? I bet it would be useful to other nonprofits.
- nowarninglabel 14y agoWell, it's funny, Viva is predominantly built on Drupal (which is open-source), though running D5. Then there is a heavy amount of customization on top of it, including hacking core. I inherited it 2 years ago when I came to work for Kiva and had to do a lot to get it to just stop breaking all the time. That said, actually two non-profits have asked to use it or have a similar functionality built for them, and I'm interested in doing something like that, but we'd have to de-couple all the Kiva specific stuff.