Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

This is great. I did what you asked and used the site and it is indeed extraordinarily compelling. I might suggest a move away from Paypal (only because the Paypal checkout experience is more intrusive and annoying than the state of the art).

Our annual all-hands summit is next week, and we'll look for ways to work this into our charity match programs. Many people on HN have companies with employees; we were told about running charity matches by other friends who have companies and let me pass the message along: they work really well. Match programs have generated more goodwill for us than bonus programs. Start a match program!

I have a question:

The big charity in this space is Partners In Health, which has an extremely positive reputation (their cofounder is also now the President of the World Bank), spends 94% of their funding on program expenses, and has a CEO who makes less than 6 figures. (PIH is apparently a medical partner for Watsi).

Is the advantage of Watsi over PIH that 100% of funds go to program expenses, rather than 94%? Or is it that fine-grained funding is more compelling and will thus elicit more donations?

All of the treatments funded on Watsi are provided by our partner organizations (names listed on the patient profiles) and our first partner, Nyaya Health, is a Partners in Health clinic in Nepal.

So in short, the benefit of Watsi is both of those you described. 1) 100% of funds directly fund treatments and 2) those treatments are performed by great organizations like Nyaya.

Is there a kind of care I'd be funding using Watsi that I wouldn't be funding as effectively if I routed contributions directly to PIH?

Or is the big advantage to Watsi (from a 1000ft view) that it creates an especially compelling way to get people to contribute on-the-ground operating funds to places like PIH?

The latter is certainly a huge big deal, in case I sound skeptical. I'm just trying to refine my understanding of how all this stuff works.

Congratulations on all of this.

You also have to take into account the amount of time it would take for PIH to deal with direct contributions. It's a non-trivial problem for these organizations to focus on that aspect when their core competency is to focus on the medical work they do. We've seen this a lot at Kiva where our partners are able to do things they could not have done otherwise because we are providing a source of funds that they don't have to devote resources towards, allowing for reaching new regions, providing different loan terms (for instance "bullet" loans for agriculture that pay off at the end and can be difficult for a small MFI to deal with), and for reach new groups of people with services, such as the completely unbanked.

That said Partners in Health seems to be a fairly robust organization and seems to have the donation handling and web presence problem solved, but Watsi is still providing a place to evangelize them to people who would otherwise never come across them.

Speaking of Kiva, is Watsi going to need volunteer translators? Kiva has a great program where people volunteer to translate loan applications into English, and excellent infrastructure to support it. (My wife has been a Kiva translator for a long time, and might be interested in translating for Watsi, since she specializes in Spanish to English medical documents.)

Oh what a coincide! I work on the software, Viva, that the volunteer translators use at Kiva :)

Nice! Have you considered open sourcing Viva? I bet it would be useful to other nonprofits.

Well, it's funny, Viva is predominantly built on Drupal (which is open-source), though running D5. Then there is a heavy amount of customization on top of it, including hacking core. I inherited it 2 years ago when I came to work for Kiva and had to do a lot to get it to just stop breaking all the time. That said, actually two non-profits have asked to use it or have a similar functionality built for them, and I'm interested in doing something like that, but we'd have to de-couple all the Kiva specific stuff.

Really insightful question. With Nyaya Health (the PIH org) we're funding treatments they don't normally provide their patients (specialty referral care, think heart surgery and the like), so yes, there's a big difference between funding organizations directly and funding via Watsi.

Here's a link to the first patient we funded via Nyaya (http://www.flickr.com/photos/nyayahealth/8405959818/in/photo...). She had to take a 72-hour trip from Far Western Nepal to Kathmandu to receive life-saving heart surgery. This is a pretty expensive endeavor by Nepali standards ($1,125 USD), and without funding from an organization like Watsi, specialty care for individual patients like Bageshwori is out of the question.

Wow. There are treatments PIH can only provide in Nepal because of a site you built? That is completely amazing. Congratulations.

If you're willing to fund overhead and give up the direct-to-recipient portion, you "should" contribute to PIH because nonprofits have a much easier time covering their program costs compared to overhead costs. Nobody wants to contribute to office supplies or fundraising costs, they're not sexy, even if necessary.

Of course, you should also support Watsi because as they succeed and drive a ton of extra contributions toward program-costs-only, even if there isn't enough existing overhead covered, there "should" be strategic donors who see this happening and decide to fund it.

This is all assuming Watsi's average partner is interchangeable with PIH, along with the treatments you'd be funding, which of course they aren't. Based on Chase's comment on Bageshwori, it may be very different-- it sounds like by directly funding PIH you'd be contributing to basic (though still potentially lifesaving) care through PIH, whereas with Watsi-via-PIH you have the option of (and often are?) contributing to more difficult, expensive, and perhaps otherwise-even-more-unavailable care.

If you're feeling generous, support both :)

(PIH spends a remarkably high 94% of its donations on program expenses, fyi: http://www.charitynavigator.org/index.cfm?bay=search.summary..., though there's long been a philanthropy-wide consensus that over-focusing on overhead is common and unhelpful: http://blog.givewell.org/2009/12/01/the-worst-way-to-pick-a-...)

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