

Nkoso: Global crowdfunding platform for education - chaseadam17
https://nkoso.org/

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kgmpers
Do you thinking providing funding to individual kids is more successful than
creating a pool for everyone? I'd feel bad for the one student that for
whatever reason happens to be overlooked by the internet, while their peer
gets funded. What if you grouped students by school or class? That way the
potential failure or rejection is shared by the group rather than just one
kid.

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benblodgett
I think people prefer to donate to people vs a cause. I do like the idea of
grouping students by class, however I want to keep the goal amount as low as
possible. We are focused on making charity more accessible to the masses, so I
want someone who donates $5 to feel like they have a direct impact. This would
dilute if the goal was $1000 vs $100.

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shaydoc
Is this the future of charity? The transparency on offer is really good in
that you can see exactly how donations are going to help these kids. The
concept has obviously been well publicized with watsi.org, and rightly so, its
very benevolent.

My question is what are the overheads with this kind of organisation, how do
you pay your own bills?

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benblodgett
That's a great question and it is one of the toughest problems with the model.
We have decided to take a fee (3% of tuition) in order to cover our basic
technical costs.

In order to become more sustainable we are building partnerships with other
ngos who can benefit from our technology.

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shaydoc
good luck with this. the good thing and the thing I admire about this and
Watsi.org is you are using technology to benefit others.

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molsongolden
Can you speak for a moment on how Nkoso compares to Vittana? They are the only
other similar organization that I know much about and they have been working
at it for a few years now with some good success.

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benblodgett
Vittana is a great organization, we have a lot of admiration for them. The
primary difference is the level of education that we focus on. Unlike Vittana
we are helping students in primary school vs secondary or higher education.

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molsongolden
That's awesome. I didn't make that distinction at first but you should be able
to make even more of a long-term difference by helping children at this stage.

