Non profit funding organizations?

Was reading through a recent post of mine again, where I tried to explain the disparity in money given for certain things by continuing with the notion of money as an IOU on a favor. But that was kind of a depressing conclusion to me, as it means weirdly enough that groups of people may naturally give more for a triviality than for something very important to them.

But it may not be as grim as I think. Of course there are important non profit organizations out there that DO get funding.

And fundraising is a big deal for lots of things and I really started thinking in this direction after watching Wikipedia make appeals for funds, and also the Mozilla foundation through its Firefox browser making similar appeals.

I highly recommend giving them money. They do an awesome job for lots of people.

However, I wondered: why couldn't there be fundraising companies that just did fundraising, who say could only take 5% or less of funds raised and had to distribute the rest to non profit organizations?

Then people who are just really good at raising money could specialize and maybe some non profits could quit worrying about raising the money themselves.

That's one of those fantasy ideas as I don't know if you could build a non profit web company around that idea.

A non profit whose only goal was to raise funds for other non profits? Has that been done?

If not, I think it should be.

It could be forced to be focused--only distribute to other non profits with no other distributions allowed, including no direct distributions to individuals.

At first I'm thinking there'd have to be lots of rules to keep it from being abused, but transparency is the most powerful tool: such a company would have to reveal all its distribution financials--who it gives money, and how much.

And along with transparency it would, of course, also simply have to comply with existing laws.

But total transparency is what would make it a 21st century web company. And that's what would give donors greatest confidence their money wasn't being misdirected.

Really like this idea and the post seems to be popular here, but wondering what to do next.


James Harris