Even if you don't follow fundraising trends, you may have heard of Kiva. Oprah and Bill Clinton are both big fans, and it's received a lot of media coverage of late.

What is Kiva? Well, it's an exciting web service that allows individuals to make microloans (literally, small loans – as little as $25) to entrepreneurs in developing countries. Microfinance institutions screen individual entrepreneurs, and post profiles of qualified ones online. Individual lenders are then able to browse the profiles and select who they'd like to support – perhaps the young man who wants to fix up his family restaurant, or the woman who needs a new sewing machine for her home seamstressing business. The entrepreneurs pay back their loans to the microfinance institutions, who return it, via Kiva, to the lenders.

If this strikes a chord with you, you're not alone. In fact, Kiva has found themselves with a somewhat enviable "problem" – they have more interested lenders than they have entrepreneurs to match them to! As a person who DOES follow fundraising trends quite closely, I've been watching Kiva's rise to fame with interest, and considering what indicators if offers about the future of online fundraising.

I see Kiva as a powerful model of genuine engagement, connecting people in new ways that were not previously possible (which is, in my opinion, one of the most valuable features of the internet). Interested lenders have the opportunity to look through the profiles of people who need a loan – and reading these stories offers a compelling degree of personal connection. So Kiva provides individuals with a new and meaningful way to connect with (and help) other people. Other online fundraising initiatives may do well to imitate this. There is no doubt that many donors these days enjoy the opportunity to be more personally involved in their philanthropy.

Kiva represents true peer-to-peer giving. The amounts are relatively small, and there is strong value in the connection that is established between both parties. This stands in contrast to the reality faced by larger charities, who often deal with larger amounts and need to make more complex decisions about where the funds are allocated. There is no denying the fact that Web 2.0 is moving us to a user-generated world where individuals move from being passive recipients and instead become active participants who seek out and will ultimately demand active engagement in the causes that there are connected to. And so I think we'll see larger charities starting to shift. They may not be able to connect givers with recipients like Kiva can, but they will need to find other ways to connect givers with an experience that they perceive as meaningful. How they will do this I believe will emerge as new types of social software and online fundraising software emerges. But that'll be the topic of another blog post someday...