A ramble about quantified selflessness

It doesn't sound very charitable but in this age of chuggers and £10 direct debits, people often feel like they want something in return for their charitable support... I'm sure it's a combination of doubt, suspicion and more besides but its still a major issue for charities.

In the past the focus was often on feedback, and on providing some means of equating your ongoing commitment to the cause. We created episodic sites that created links with communities, the opportunity to communicate with them, and provided a much richer look at the situations and how they were improved with aid. With a group of other charities we looked into means of tracking a donation, how far and wide it traveled, the good it really did, the people it reached. We talked about metadata, rfid platforms, technology and all that jazz. But it all fell at the feet of practical considerations, and although it was a worthwhile goal and there was a lot of support, there were too many challenges to move forward.

Roll on a few years and we have banks helping us by rounding up pennies in pounds, gadgets like striiv enabling us to donate when we achieve our fitness goals and little checkboxes on restaurant bills and planes to add a little something for others. We even have platforms like theMutual that encourages donations by providing incentives like exclusive deals. So there are a load of good ideas around that make it easier to do a little good. But as we approach a world where the most accurate record of our contributions becomes our Facebook timeline, and where our obsession with creating and gathering data seems to grow and grow, it seems that people are and can increasingly be satisfied by a little social selflessness status update now and again.

Often it seems that to get the real mass market into thinking about doing something they need to be able to really see what's in it for them perhaps there is opportunity in this area of what i find myself (slightly squirmingly) calling quantified selflessness; feeding back to a passive individual the good that they are doing and then allowing them to share it as they see fit.