Following Fred Wilson's blog I came across a new way to support education through charity. I think this is pretty radical, because it allows you to support particular projects instead of giving your money to a school as a lump sum. You now know how the money will be spent.
This can and should be translated to most forms of donations in my opinion. I think people would be giving more money if they had such transparency in what their money will be spent on. I understand it may be difficult to support really big projects which require on-going support but say someone like AID (who hosted Indian Ocean's trip to the US this year) adopted such a model. They could find schools in rural India or villages which have specific needs. Figure out how much money is required. Look for the funds. Support the project.
And what also happens is once they get the traffic on their website, they could find ways to engage the visitor to more projects.
I for sure would be interested in supporting project based funding rather than simply giving my money to a NGO, irrespective of the reputation of any such NGOs.
