Digital Age Philanthropy

Philanthropy, or the act of donating money or goods to benefit the lives of other people, is a practice that has gone on for ages. All sorts of entities, from large conglomerates to entire governments, to mere individuals, have been donating whatever they can since time immemorial to make life better for other people. The good news is that philanthropy has evolved with the times—as the landscape of connectivity changes because of technology, so has philanthropy.

If you work in the nonprofit industry, you’d have likely seen how a number of mainstream nonprofits and foundations started shifting their focus on ensuring the proper management of digital assets and infrastructure. Nowadays, nonprofits have specific arms whose sole purpose is to make it easy for people to donate online. As such, donating these days requires nothing more than a few clicks of a mouse.

It would be interesting to see how much the act of philanthropy would change further as technology continues to develop. Hopefully, in the future, people would integrate the act of giving into their daily activities as much as technology—and their generous hearts—would allow. This will surely generate more funds for charity, but ultimately, it’s all about knowing that you’ve done something good and you’ve done so without so much of an effort. That is technology’s greatest benefit.

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eBay's team got to work building a fundraising program that could unleash the widespread generosity of its broad online community.