Very happy to see this. At the very least, it's great news for the nonprofit world, which needs desperately to learn some of the basic the lessons of the startup world: fail fast, iterate, focus on your users, and more.
Would be interesting to observe how the established nonprofits react to this. Many of them do the following: Make their target audience (who they claim to care for) more dependent (i.e., don't solve the problem, just give some temporal ease) and take money from third parties (state, private donors) that don't control them.
My guess is that they would come up with many arguments against this startup-ish approach and would lobby for legal barriers.
Watsi is already working with huge names in this space. PIH, one of the best known, funds on-the-ground medical care in places like Haiti and Subsaharan Africa. I don't think anyone in these places cares how "dependent" they are on PIH; their kids are living with broken femurs, infected bones, cataracts, and hernias.
Thanks for the info. I didn't intend to imply that they (or other nonprofit startups) would face opposition by all established players. It's just that I found many "nonprofits" showing questionable behaviours: The people working in the field are often very interested in helping, (some but important) people in the administration became cynics or bigots and working for a nonprofit became less of a mission and more of a job option and power play and protecting their org's income streams and spheres of influence is more important than helping.
This is a POV from Germany where you have a wealthy population willing to donate and many sharks eager to catch the fish. Add to this that some legal circumstances make it possible for the established players to keep fresh competition out of public money streams or eat plenty of the private donor money (e.g., up to 49% for admin costs).
I'm sure this is true of a lot of charitable endeavors, but the health care charities are generally about getting medical teams on the ground and deploying desperately needed care.
It makes sense to route contributions to reputable charities. In the medical space, you have not only PIH but also organizations like Médecins Sans Frontières/DWB-USA. One of the very cool things about what Watsi is doing is that they provide a front end that routes contributions to multiple reputable on-the-ground health care providers, like PIH clinics.
As a member of the non-profit community (I help run GlobalGiving.org, one of the first non-profit crowdfunding platforms), we're actually doing the exact opposite. My first response to reading this? Sending Watsi an email letting them know that I've got 10 years of hard data on what works and what doesn't for motivating donors to give to specific projects and a standing invitation for me to share this knowledge with them.
At least within the tech non-profit world (GlobalGiving, Kiva, DonorsChoose.org, charity:water, etc) we're all very friendly and supportive of each other. We're so strapped for resources that it only makes sense for us to help each other out.
After all, we're all in this to make the world a better place and know that we can't do it alone.
