World on Fire

World on Fire

This posting is part philanthropy, part tech. I came across a wonderful music video the other day on Veoh from Sarah McLachlan about her top 10 song, World on Fire. In it, she shows the impact that relatively small amounts of money have on the hundreds of millions of people in poor countries in the third world (books, medicine, wells, etc). We saw this first hand this year when our family donated a well to a village our church had adopted.  Dick Kiphardt, of William Blair fame, led the charge personally, flying out there with his wife to help build a school as well as the wells. Many of these villages suffer from disease, poor crop yields and other issues because they do not have potable water. Dick tells me that one of the biggest impacts wells have on villages is that it frees up many of the girls to go to school, who spend much of the day walking down the road for water pre-well. What is the price for reduced disease, more food, better educated girls (who are more likely to post-pone early child birth, etc)? Less than $5,000. Amazing (and no, I promise this is not a solicitation). You should take a look at the video and pass it on.

This gets me to the “tech” part of this blog. I came across this video originally at Veoh by happen stance. By some estimates, this video has been viewed/downloaded on different sites over 1,000,000 times. I don’t think that any of us fully appreciate the impact and disruption that this user generated content revolution will result in. In the example of the World on Fire video, I looked at it and shared it with my wife and kids. The kids decided we should increase our support beyond the well in Africa. I showed it to a couple of other people and several have also decided to give. We are just 2 or 3 views of the half million. I don’t know what the conversion rate or impact is, but if we are any indication of the power of viral user-generated content, Sarah’s video will deliver big dividends well beyond her $150,000 in donations.

Fred Wilson has a great piece on this regarding the most popular Time articles emailed (http://avc.blogs.com/a_vc/2006/03/times_select_an.html) None of the top 10 are written by their top columnists. More and more sites are enabling ordinary people to create, post and search for content/media while bypassing traditional media channels. It struck me hardest when Katrina rolled through Louisiana and the first wave of photos, stories and video were all produced my Joe on the Street and posted. Even mainstream news organizations were leveraging this content.

Let the revolution begin...

Comments

[Eric]

Have you cheked out microfinance and Unitus? It is a very cool way to help the poorest of the poor help themselves by turning them into entrepreneurs.

I recently released a special edition of VentureWeek on the subject with Dave McClure (http://500hats.typepad.com/) and Dave Schappell of Unitus. Again, another way user generated content is helping spread the message of a worthy cause!

[Matt]

Thanks for the suggestion. Will definitely check out Unitus and your Venture Week podcast. People often get involved with causes because someon they know engaged them. Social networking will be very powerful in facilitating. Someone should contact Unitus about creating a feed for their site with updates on success stories.

[Ashok Malhotra]

Yes very small amounts of money directed properly can do a great deal of good in poor third world countries. This is illustrated in a story of a poor third world village called 'Mystic and the Blossoms'. The book can be viewed at http://lulu.com/am