We know these are just some of the ideas available with real-time activism. If you've got ideas on how organizations can better utilize the real-time web add your ideas in the comments below or in the event wiki. If you'd like to help Consumers Union build the tools we've discussed above email fostgr@consumer.org

Since her unplanned departure from an L.A.-based startup in 2008, Berrent has traveled through eight countries, documenting and publicizing the struggles of those in developing areas through her blog posts, tweets, images, videos, and her own presence at events at home and abroad. From post-Katrina New Orleans to a trash dump in Manila to a monastery in Burma, read on for her story of trying to achieve social good through social media.

I am a strong believer in the idea that the things you do online are meant to facilitate your offline interactions. People are so fast to click a button, and that can be great. Retweeting, forwarding, and Facebook walls are great engagements. But what's more difficult is the donate button. That's the big hurdle and disconnect. I'm trying to provide these inspirational opportunities in timeboxed campaigns. Social media is slowly catching on, but there's a lot of noise. Standing out is hard; it's important to have an offline component.

Berrent was visibly disturbed by what she witnessed at this Manila trash dump, where she saw shoeless children running through piles of debris.

RWW: Tell me about your experiences with Kiva borrowers. What kinds of people and enterprises have you seen? In your opinion, does microlending have a measurable impact on struggling local economies?

Kiva is really unique. It has a lot of power users - more than any nonprofit I've ever seen. One man has made a thousand loans. It's individual stories, and people really connect. You get updates on that person, and people say it's their favorite email of the month. As a microlending company, Kiva is one spoke in the larger wheel of microfinance. On a global scale, it has a very big impact.

Typically, when you go to a village or province, certain industries are prevalent. In a fishing community, maybe the borrower bought a fishnet or a fishing boat. In an area with a lot of bamboo, it's going to be crafts. I worked in eleven branch offices. I met over 40 different female borrowers individually and over 250 in my time there.

I can see that the money Kiva provides makes a difference. Microfinance is a very slow process, and there are gems and sparks of people who break through the poverty cycle. When you see villages changing, it's really something. It's like watching grass grow, but it's really beautiful grass.

This woman is a pig farmer and a recipient of funds from a Kiva-affiliated organization.

RWW: Now you're working on a seven-day, seven-city tour to raise awareness and funds for malaria prevention through bed nets. Where did this idea come from?

It's a city-by-city competition on who can raise the most money for malaria nets, but also an opportunity for anyone to donate who wants to get involved. The tour starts this Saturday night in New York City and continues for the next seven days in Miami, New Orleans, Chicago, Seattle, San Francisco, and ends in Los Angeles on Friday...

I'd just finished Kiva training, and I was going to the Philippines for three months. And all I could think was, "When I come back, I'm going to be thirty." I've honed in a lot on my direction - using the Internet to help people. And what if I could use this opportunity to give back, involving people in different parts of the country - something really ambitious?

I wanted it to be about saving lives. I wanted to say, "I saved this many lives on my birthday." I've done a lot of work in HIV and AIDS; I looked into that and polio and malaria, and that's what stuck with me. The campaign has no administrative fees. One hundred percent of the funds go to malaria... in rural northern Ghana. Providing malaria nets will really be a part of saving lives there.

Berrent met this monk in Burma and spent the afternoon pagoda-hopping with him.

RWW: What needs or gaps do you see in philanthropic efforts online?

I think it's not having a strategy to begin with, not knowing the tools in your toolbox before you start. There's a lot to be said for jumping in and having fun, but nonprofits don't have the resources to play around online. They think it's about getting interns and getting followers and fans without figuring out why a medium is important and how to make it successful for them.

RWW: What's one surprise - good or bad - that you've come across since you started working with Kiva? What did you not expect from this experience, and what did you learn?

I learned that it's much more complicated than the website makes it seem. There's an entire division devoted to foreign exchange currency. The operational cost analysis, the challenges of technology in the developing world, the processes of remittance - it's incredibly complex. There are regional specialists. On the site, you can make a loan in five clicks, but a lot of machinery comes together to make it that way.

RWW: What's next for you? Is there more globe-trotting in your immediate future? How do you think the web will continue to be part of your life and career?

One of the best parts of this past year has been that I've gone through long periods where I didn't have Internet access. That's brought me a heightened and renewed sense of my purpose in the world and my authentic desire to make the world a better place. I'd like to be able to continue to support campaigns - even for-profit ventures - that I believe in, and I think social business is a wonderful intersection of the two.

I want to explore avenues with online and offline components, while continuing to blog and tell stories I'm passionate about.

Follow Berrent's next adventures on Twitter or at her blog.

And all this is just the tip of the iceburg that is Sloane Berrent's fascinating story. For a fuller look at her travels and timeline, check out this list of her nine favorite posts on her blog, The Causemopolitan, covering humanitarianism, her work in New Orleans, the phenomenon of serendipity in international travel, and much more.

Many thanks to Sloane Berrent for the use of her videos and images as well as for sharing her story with us and our readers.

Says Ask spokesperson Nicholas Graham, "Health and reference are already two of our strongest verticals. It makes sense for Ask to team up with Komen and increase awareness amongst our 50 million monthly visitors."

According to the American Cancer Society, there are about 2.5 million breast cancer survivors in the United States and women have a 1 in 8 chance of developing invasive breast cancer. While there are a number of breast cancer-related corporate partnerships, only a few are fully embraced by health advocates. In recent years, environmental health organizations have formed the Think Before You Pink campaign as a backlash movement against companies that work on pink ribbon campaigns but manufacture products linked to the disease. Because Ask specializes in delivering information to its consumers, a public information campaign on breast cancer seems like a great fit.

Says Graham, "When you engage a community of users, the service becomes more robust. It makes a positve difference in the online and offline world." To change your skins and support Komen for the Cure visit the Ask Skins gallery.

At current spending levels, Omidyar will be contributing just over 10% of WIkipedia's full expenses. The Foundation has been concerned about the global economic climate's impact on donations and is about to enter into a major new period of its history in which the free-form editing of Wikipedia will be slowed by a new approval process that has long been expected.

Wikimedia said in its annual report that it plans to spend a total of $9.4 million over the 2009-2010 year. Just three years ago, in '06-'07, the organization spent only $3 million. Back in the old days of '04-'05, it cost just $100,000 to run everything.

Wikimedia joins a long list of organizations in the Omidyar portfolio, including well-known Web 2.0 names like Digg, Seesmic and the Sunlight Foundation.

The grant will fund a study of barriers to entry for users and contributors new to Wikimedia Commons. The project team will also identify best practices from similar media-sharing sites. The team will design and implement a simpler workflow for uploading, licensing, and describing media.

"We want to make uploading files to Commons as easy as possible so that people everywhere can join us in helping Commons grow. The bigger Commons is, the more people it will serve."

According to the Ford Foundation website, the funds are granted to select organizations that support emerging leaders, research and dialog, and life-changing or life-improving innovations. Typically, fewer than 3 percent of grant applicants are selected for funding, and purely scientific projects are not typically considered for these grants.

Ford Foundation representative Jenny Toomey said in the Wikimedia statement, "The global community that is building Wikimedia Commons is setting the standard for the way that video and images are uploaded and shared through the Web.

"The whole process is simplified, promotes collaboration, and is driven by consensus among the community. Ultimately, this approach and others like it can help ensure that the Internet remains a rich and open space for learning, expression, and participation."

The Wikimedia Foundation is the non-profit organization which operates Wikipedia, the free, online encyclopedia. Wikipedia contains more than 12 million articles in 265 languages contributed by a community of more than 100,000 volunteers.

According to an email we received from Mozilla, "Everyone should have the opportunity to know how to use the Internet, have easy access to it, and have a good experience when they're online. This new initiative is looking for people with a talent for writing, designing, programming, developing, or all-around technical know-how. Internet skills, no matter how novice or advanced, can change people's lives and make the Web better for everyone." Mozilla Service Week will take place from September 14-21, 2009.

According to the Mozilla Foundation's Executive Director, Mark Surman, this program is designed to allow all kinds of users to volunteer their time. Some of the skills required for the above-mentioned goals are as simple as data entry or basic web surfing.

"We're inviting people to get involved with Mozilla in an active way," he is quoted on the Mozilla blog, "even if they can't code, test, or localize. It lets anyone and everyone feel like they are contributing to the cause of building a better Internet."

Interested parties can learn more at the Service Week website. The site allows would-be volunteers to find ways to give their time and skills to the cause, and it also lets those in need, be they individuals or organizations, request help.

The Mozilla Foundation is a non-profit organization dedicated to fostering openness, innovation, and opportunity on the Internet by supporting the community of Mozilla contributors and by helping those who build technologies that benefit users around the world.

The change will apply to all text and multimedia content, including video, images, and audio now licensed under GFDL 1.2 or later versions and will increase "the compatibility and availability of free content," according to the WMF site.

The change in licensing was made possible in November 2008 when the Free Software Foundation updated its most recent of the GFDL, adding language specifically to accomodate the WMF's desire to switch to Creative Commons licensing.

As we reported last month, in the event that the WMF board approves the proposal, existing content will be dual-licensed and new content will be CC-BY-SA licensed only. "This will ensure that any content shared from Wikipedia in the future can be done under the now broadly-used terms of Creative Commons licensing and without the additional restrictions required by the GFDL, which was created more for application code documentation and is slightly more stringent, for example requiring anyone using the content to include the full license code with each use," wrote RWW blogger Phil Glockner.

"When I started Wikipedia, Creative Commons did not exist," wrote Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales on the site's Q&A page regarding the licensing changes. "The CC-BY-SA license is a more generic license that meets the needs of Wikipedia today, and I'm very grateful that the FSF has allowed this change to happen... It's a critically necessary change for the future of Wikimedia."

As the current Vice President of New Business Development, Smith is a proven deal maker for Google, having led the acquisitions of Keyhole ( which became Google Earth), Where2Tech (which became Google Maps), and Picasa as well as co-leading discussions with publishers surrounding Google Book Search.

Bear in mind that she retains that Vice President position in addition to taking on the General Manager role - and that's what makes this reorganization so interesting.

What Does This Move Mean?

Clearly Google discovered that doing good was good business - perhaps even better business than "Do no evil."

According to Dr. Brilliant's post:

"[O]ur greatest impact has come when we've attacked problems in ways that make the most of Google's strengths in technology and information; examples of this approach include Flu Trends, RechargeIT, Clean Energy 2030, and PowerMeter. By aligning Google.org more closely with Google as a whole, Megan will ensure that we're better able to build innovative, scalable technology and information solutions."

It only makes sense for Google to bring these pursuits closer to the fold: they provide generous amounts of data for analysis and they continue to facilitate leading-edge engineering at a time when more traditional pursuits are beginning to soften.

It will be interesting to see what Smith brings to the Google.org organization, but it's safe to assume that there will be some deals in the works. Our guess? We'd say the first deals Smith brokers are with Google PowerMeter and the major power providers in the US.

Or do you have a better idea about where Google might be going with this move?

We love the simplicity of the alert feature. And we're hopeful that it proves to be an easy way to keep people informed about Kiva. But we're also fighting a constant battle with piles of email and overflowing inboxes. Hopefully, we'll have the option of pulling an RSS feed of alert information in the future. In the meantime, the Kiva Alerts emails will definitely be among the ones we're sure to read.

Collaborating for the Greater Good

For Kiva, opening the API also meant issuing a challenge to developers - to join Kiva in making the world a better place:

"It is going to take a lot of innovation, a lot of creativity, and a lot of passionate people bringing the opportunity of loans to places they've never been. Because we believe in the power of you as a part of this open and transparent community we are opening our digital doors today and asking you to help us change the world with loans."

BetterLabs, a small incubator focused on helping businesses create working prototypes of their product concepts, jumped at the chance to help Kiva spread the word:

"We believe KivaAlerts.com will remind every one interested in supporting the Kiva causes more proactively and we also hope that users will forward interesting loan alerts to friends and family and help grow the lenders at Kiva.org for global good."

It's great to see this collaborative development happening for a good cause. Here's hoping other developers are similarly motivated to take up the challenge. We can't wait to see even more applications leveraging the Kiva API.

SitePoint's Bushfire Appeal

On the subject of worthy charities, Australian-based media company SitePoint is currently running a special promotion to help the victims of the terrible bushfires in the Melbourne area. SitePoint is offering 5 books (in PDF format) and you pay for just 1; and 100% of the proceeds from that will be donated to the Australian Red Cross Victorian Bushfire Appeal 2009.

While the Knight Foundation's endowment has been hurt by the current economic climate, the Foundation is still committed to granting a total of $24 million to local media projects over the next five years.

Another good example for an organization that was awarded a grant by the the Knight Foundation is the Coral Gables Community Foundation in Coral Gables, Florida. This group, together with the University of Miami, will use its grant to train seniors to report, write, and blog about local affairs.

A complete list of sponsored projects can be found here. A second round of grants will be awarded later this year.

No Advertising

The Wikimedia Foundation has always declined to run advertising on its pages. Given that it is one of the most popular destinations on the Internet, it could surely make more than $6.2 million in revenue every year, but the organization, and Jimmy Wales in particular, have always vehemently rejected this idea in favor of direct donations from users.

Mobile technology is most likely to be used in Asia or Africa, where wired infrastructure is less common. Indeed, seven of the eleven case studies included with the report detailed mobile use among organizations working in African nations.

"Well over 3.5 billion mobile phones are in use around the world and organizations are harnessing this technology to help overcome humanitarian challenges," said Timothy E. Wirth, President of the United Nations Foundation in a press release. "Modern telecommunications, and the creative use of it, has the power to change lives and help the UN solve some of the world’s biggest challenges. It can connect families separated by disaster, help emergency relief workers respond more quickly, empower health workers with data to help combat disease and epidemics, track the impacts of climate change, and even help in the resolution of civil conflicts."

By far the most common use of technology is voice, followed by text messages. But more sophisticated uses such as photo and video messaging, mapping, data collection and analysis, and inventory management are on the rise. NGOs said that the use of mobile devices has allowed them to save time, transmit data more quickly and accurately, more quickly mobilize individuals, gather data, and reach audiences that were previously unreachable.

The case studies cover the areas of public health (such as connecting health workers to one another in Uganda), humanitarian assistance (such as alerting Iraqi refugees to food aid drop offs in Syria), and environmental conservation (such as using text messages to raise awareness about deforestation in Argentina). The entire report is available for download in PDF format from the UN Foundation web site.

"The main theme that jumped out at us is that major donors -- or the wired wealthy as we call them -- are very active online with the intention of becoming even more so when it comes to their philanthropic support," said Vinay Bhagat, Founder and Chief Strategy Officer for Convio in a press release. "Based on what these important donors told us, we believe a tremendous opportunity exists for nonprofit organizations to better leverage their online presence to improve the online experience of the wired wealthy."

Convio, Edge, and Sea Change expect that the results of their research will change the way some charities approach online fundraising. Specifically, they found that more than half of those surveyed preferred giving online, and 80% said they did at least some of their donating via the Internet (and a good portion do it via credit card to get the frequent flier miles). That's imporant because even though the "wired wealthy" made up just about 1% of donors to the charities involved in the study, they accounted for approximately 32% of their annual gifts.

Unfortunately for charities, less than half of respondents thought charity web sites were generally well-designed, that charities did enough to connect with them online, or that they were inspired by charity sites. So how can organizations better connect with these important constituents? Email is one method. According to the study, 65% of the "wired wealthy" always open email sent from charities they support, and about 3/4ths of respondents said that email reminders about the renewal of an annual gift are "appropriate." But just 43% thought emails from charities were usually well-written or inspiring, indicating that thus far email has been a lost opportunity for many non-profit organizations. Further, a large majority of respondents said an email letting them know how their donation was spent would make they more likely to give again, as would controls on how often a charity was allowed to email them.

More than half of respondents also use YouTube, which points to online video as another pontential way to connnect with wealthy donors online.

"We believe this research will fundamentally shift the way some nonprofit organizations approach their relationships with major donors online," said Mark Rovner, Principal of Sea Change Strategies.

The study revealed three distinct personality types among the "wired wealthy."

• 29% are Relationship Seekers - Relationship seekers put the most stock in how a charity web site forms a connection with them. They tend to skew younger (under 45) and are most likely to engage in social activities with the charity. 2/3rds of relationship seekers say that a charity's web site plays a role in whether or not they give money.
• 41% are Casual Connectors - Like relationship seekers, so-called casual connectors also seek a connection with the charity. However, for them it is less personal -- they're more interested in things like how efficiently the charity is using their money and want easy access to that information.
• 30% are All Business - The all business set doesn't care about feeling connected to the charity, rather they want the donation process to be as easy and painless as possible. They also tend give the most money.

It certainly seems possible to appeal to each of those personality types via a single web site, which is exactly what the authors of the study hope will happen. "The research provides important insight into the ways non-profits can better connect, motivate and retain these donors. The results of this research will provide a variety of different non-profit organizations -- both large and small -- the tools to assess their online strategy and make adjustments where necessary to better capture big opportunities," said Rovnar.

In September, we wondered if the web was still a windfall for non-profits. With online donations up 37% in 2006 according to The Chronicle of Philanthropy, it is clear that the web, if not yet the main point for charitable donation, is playing an increasingly more important role. As part of that online fundraising strategy, targeting the "wired wealthy" is something that charities should be taking into account.

Think of it as Trulia plus, with a social justice angle, or Zillow for people interested in more than just the price of a house.

I think this is a great idea and hope the project will succeed. Launching first in Chicago in Q3 of this year, it would be great to see MoveSmart go nation wide. MoveSmart is one of the first entrants in the NetSquared Mashup Challenge, an event that will bring nonprofit mashups together with developers, feedback and funding. $100,000 will be distributed by NetSquared to selected finalists at the event in May. Check out the work over there and consider lending a hand.