The concerned and altruistic young professional in Seattle with a few dollars to spare will not just “witness” every future disaster but will also be bombarded with ways to help. His inbox, Twitter feed, Facebook profile and search results will be clogged. He’ll be overwhelmed but he will comb through the options and attempt to make a fast but serious judgment call based on what he sees—which group has the best-looking website, the most robust social-media presence, the highest-profile supporters. No expert, how is he to decide which organization is the right one to donate to? He’ll have to rely on the trust he feels for a certain group, and in this, organizations with strong marketing skills that can pitch to him (or his profile) directly will have the edge.
There is a real risk of the traditional NGOs being crowded out by these start-up organizations. Some start-ups will be genuinely helpful, but not all will be genuine. Opportunists will take advantage of the new possibilities for direct marketing and the lower bar to entry. When those groups are eventually held to account, it will weaken donor trust (and probably generate momentum to expose more fraudulent participants). There will also be an oversupply of vanity projects from known celebrities and business leaders, whose high-wattage campaigns will only further distract attention from the real work needed to be done on the ground. In all, the result of turning “doing good” into a marketing competition means more players but less real help, as established organizations are pushed aside.
Intervention, as we’ve said before, requires expertise. Coordinating aid, enabling government oversight and setting realistic expectations all become harder as the field becomes more crowded. Technology can help with this. The government could keep a centralized database of all NGO actors and then register, monitor and rank each one on an online platform with the help of the public. There already are monitoring and rating systems for NGOs—Charity Navigator, One World Trust’s civil-society organizations (CSO) database, and NGO Ratings—but these have mostly been NGOs themselves, even if they are helping to impose accountability, and beyond shining a spotlight on bad practices, they have no real enforcement abilities. Imagine an AAA-rating system for NGOs, where data about organizations’ activities, finances and management, along with reviews from the local community and aid recipients, is used to generate a ranking that can help guide donors and their investments. The ratings would have real-world implications, including NGOs’ losing eligibility for government funding if they fall below a certain score, or facing additional government scrutiny and processes. Without an integrated, transparent rating-and-monitoring system, governments and donors will come under a deluge of appeals from different aid organizations and they will have limited means to discern the legitimate and competent ones.
In the end, like all bubbles, this one will burst, as processes become delayed and institutional donors lose faith in reconstruction efforts. When the dust settles, those organizations left standing will be well-positioned NGOs with a targeted focus, strong donor loyalty and the ability to demonstrate a history of efficient and transparent operations. Some will be established aid groups and others will be new, but they will share certain characteristics that make them well suited for reconstruction work in the digital age. They will run solid programs with data-generating results, and pair their efforts on the ground with savvy digital marketing that both showcases their work and allows for responsive feedback from donors and aid recipients alike. The appearance of accountability and transparency will count for a lot.
The trend toward more direct engagement between donors and recipients on the ground will survive as well. NGOs will adopt new methods that aim to satisfy the desire to provide more intimate relationships, and in doing so they will accelerate another long-term trend visible today: the decentralization of aid distribution. By this we mean the move away from several key nodes (a few large, institutional NGOs) to networks of smaller conduits. Rather than donating to the main office of the Red Cross or Save the Children, increasingly, informed and involved donors will seek out special and specific programs that speak to them directly, or they will take their donations to smaller start-up NGOs that promise equivalent services. Smart, established NGOs will astutely reshape their function to serve more as aggregators than top-down directors, reimagining their role as one of linking donors directly to the people they fund—providing the right personal “experience,” such as connecting doctors in a developed country with those in a country affected by an earthquake—while still retaining complete programmatic control. (To be sure, not all donors will seek such intimate knowledge of the organizations and individuals they support. For them, it will be easy enough to “opt out” of such engagement.)
And we cannot discount the role that individuals in countries suffering disasters or conflict will play in the newly digital aid ecosystem. Connectivity will influence how one of the biggest and most common problems that postcrisis societies face—internally displaced persons (IDPs)—will be helped. Little can be done by outsiders to prevent the conditions that lead to internal displacement within a country—war, famine, natural disaster. But mobile phones will change the future for their victims. Most dislocated people will own handsets, and if they do not (or if they have to leave them behind), relief organizations will distribute phones to them. Refugee camps will be wired with 4G hot spots that allow callers to communicate with each other easily and inexpensively, and with mobile phones, the registration of IDPs will never be easier.
Most IDPs and refugees say that among their greatest challenges is lack of information. They never know how long they’ll be in one place, when food will arrive or how to get some, where they can find firewood, water and health services, and what the security threats are. With registration and specialized platforms to address these concerns, IDPs will be able to receive alerts, navigate their new environment, and receive supplies and benefits from international aid organizations on the scene. Facial-recognition software will be heavily used to find lost or missing persons. With speech-recognition technology, illiterate users will be able to speak the names of relatives and the database will report if they are in the camp system. Online platforms and mobile phones will allow refugee camps to classify and organize their members according to their skills, backgrounds and interests. In today’s refugee camps, there are large numbers of people with relevant and needed skills (doctors, teachers, soccer coaches) whose participation is only leveraged in an ad hoc manner, mobilized slowly through word-of-mouth networks throughout the camps. IDPs in the future should have access to a skills-tracker app, through which they can submit their skills or search a database for what they need, leaving no skill unused or willing participant excluded.
Widespread use of mobile phones will present new opportunities for people looking to shake up the existing model of aid distribution. A few enterprising individuals with a bit of technical know-how will be able to build an open platform where potential aid recipients like themselves can list their needs and personal information, send it to the cloud and then wait for individual donors to select them and send aid directly. This is not unlike the platform that Kiva uses for micro-finance funding, except that it would be broader in scope, more personal in nature and focused on donations instead of loans. (Naturally, a platform like this would encounter a series of mechanical and legal issues that would need to be addressed before it functioned correctly.)