Last month I wrote about the social networking site Ammado reinventing itself as a service to companies keen to develop employee giving schemes. Global Giving has also been active in this space working with Helwett Packard and with Gap amongst others. Gap Inc has it's own tailored version - www.gapincglobalgiving.com - through which Gap employees anywhere in the world can give to projects nominated by their colleagues.
Founder and CEO of Global Giving Dennis Whittle told me recently that building employee giving sites for companies is tough because of the layers of security which surround corporate IT infrastructure. A more attractive option seems to be working with companies to reach customers instead. This is what Global Giving is doing with Whole Food Market.
As with the Ammado initiative Global Giving's collaboration with a handful of big companies possible points a way forward for employee giving programmes which could by-pass the limitations of traditional payroll giving. The technology challenges though are not insignificant it seems. Perhaps the folks at Ammado should be looking at reaching customers too, rather than focusing just on employees.
