Good suggestion.

I just added $100 toward their goal.

I joined Kiva a few years ago and think it's a great way to help people around the world.

There have been may times that I've sat back and thought how cool it is that people around the world are buying my pictures through microstock.

Then someone in this forum brought up Kiva and I joined right away.  Now it's cool to think that as people around the world are buying my images, I'm giving a little bit back to people in need around the world.  Good karma!

If you haven't joined yet, please look into it!  You're not giving free handouts (in case you have a philosophical issue with that), but you're lending money to people starting or struggling to maintain small businesses in challenged areas of the world.  Some won't be able to pay you back, but I find that a sizable majority will.

Check it out!

why not donating on http://www.emphas.is ?
at least they're helping starving photojournalists and you maybe get a book or a print out of it.


sites like Kiva look 100% scam to me, i've seen so many NGO ripoffs in poor countries to believe such operations are genuine ... lending money to ugandan farmers you've never seen in person ? no way .. probably a bunch of nigerian guys running internet scams and spending your money on booze and hookers just as they do here in south east asia.

yeah, Emphas.is is ONLY for photojournalism actually, and they only accept projects by people with a decent CV and portfolio, unfortunately it seems they're financially in trouble and they're begging for donations to support Emphas.is itself !

for anything else there are photography projects on Indiegogo, Kickstarter, and many others but it seems just a way to sell you a book and merchandising, no idea if they even make money because many authors downplay the real costs involved in printing and shipping !

some will promise you a book + shipping for 30$ and then they discover they're going to lose money big time.

but from what i've seen these sites are becoming less and less relevant in bringing you buyers, all they do is acting like a platform, like Ebay .. if you don't have already a lot of followers and a big mailing list of contacts there's no way to get serious fundings.

the irony is, if i had such a big number of followers i would setup a site myself and grab 100% of the money and save the 4-5% paypal and credit cards fees and the fees for the crowdfunder site too.

it seems only 35% of the projects get fully funded and most of them are about games and electronics.

if you make photo books, hmm ... i think realistically you can expect to make no more than 5$ net profit per book but you'll have to print and ship the whole stuff and deal with complaints or people not receiving the book or whatever.

all in all .. hmm 500 or 1000$ per book in the best scenario ? yeah .. in a lucky day because if you're not famous who's gonna buy your book ? at the very least the concept or the stories should appeal to a certain niche crowd.

i think it's a great business model but it will become harder and harder because of saturation and scams and the way it's working now it's too easy to attract scammers i mean there's even people asking 5000$ to save their sick dog .. what the F ?? who can control you're for real ? a blog with photos of the dogs ? unbelievable but it says a lot more about donors than about crowdfunding.

 

i think it will be soon game over for photojournalism sponsored by crowdfunding.

if you're famous it's still working great, but if you're not .. i see plenty of projects that barely get 500$ in fundings.

and people seem to forget that it's not profit, funders expect to receive a book or a print .. it's a just a promotional pre-sale basically, it's not a donation !