The Long Tail of Charities
As you know there are a lot of music bands. You have the huge bands like Coldplay and then there are the smaller bands like Solitus, who only have local appeal (at the moment). The nice thing is, if you set the record sales of all the big bands against the rest, the small bands win easily. There are a lot of small bands.
Chris Anderson is writing a book about this subject called The Long Tail:
“The theory of the Long Tail is that our culture and economy is increasingly shifting away from a focus on a relatively small number of “hits” (mainstream products and markets) at the head of the demand curve and toward a huge number of niches in the tail.
As the costs of production and distribution fall, especially online, there is now less need to lump products and consumers into one-size-fits-all containers. In an era without the constraints of physical shelf space and other bottlenecks of distribution, narrowly-target goods and services can be as economically attractive as mainstream fare.”
This implicates that there is a huge amount of niche markets. It is now possible to go to mySpace and find just about any band you might like. The site is huge and growing. Key to the success is the decentralization and the social network factor. It is exactly those elements I like to use for the charity website. I’ll write about the social networking in a later post, first; what does this mean for our charities?
Goededoelen.nl, a big portal website in the Netherlands as the following to say about the number of Dutch charities:
“Geschat wordt dat er vijf- tot zeshonderd goede doelen in Nederland op landelijke schaal werven. Hoeveel instellingen daarnaast nog lokaal werven is niet bekend.”
Translation in English:
“There are an estimated of five to sixhundred charities in the Netherlands who are collecting Nationally. The number of smaller local charities is unknown.”
I think it’s safe to say that we have a long tail of charities. There are a lot of charities and a lot of people who want to donate to them. Perhaps the most want to donate to a local small charity. But those charities are hard to find, because there are loads of them and they all have different websites (if they have any).
So don’t we need a portal to let people find them?
And don’t these websites already exist?
Yes, but that’s not enough. There are great sites like GoedeGoelen.nl or the American CharityNavigator.org who focus on being a portal for charities. But they are not decentralized but centralized. This is not a bad thing, but it’s just a different cookie to eat. It’s like comparing Wikipedia to Encyclopædia Britannica.
We’ll always need the centralized portal sites that list the charities that are quality checked, but for now there is no Wikipedia-like alternative to include the long tail of charities in the World, or even The Netherlands. So that is exactly what I’m going to build.