By RUTH EGLASH
JPost.com 11.27.09
“Israel’s non-profit sector got a welcome boost this month when the only fully-bilingual donation portal formally launched operations, aiming to raise money for some 26,000 registered charities here.
“Our main goal is to show the positive side of Israel,” Yonatan Ben-Dor, Founder of IsraelGives, told The Jerusalem Post Thursday. “The site provides information on every non-profit here and also provides charities a chance to showcase their work. The world needs to know about the hundreds of thousands of people and non-profit organizations working to make Israel a better place. It’s a side of this country that has been hidden for too long.”IsraelGives.org, which is run in tandem with Hebrew-language Web site IsraelToremet.org, allows users here and around the world to learn about and donate to any of Israel’s non-profit organizations. It also enables organizations to gain financial independence from large donors by opening access to online micro-donations from rank-and-file Israelis and supporters of Israel around the world.
IsraelGives is not the first donation portal. Jgooders.com was launched a year ago to allow English-speakers worldwide to contribute to Israel. Ben-Dor said that his portal is uniquely bi-lingual and is free for non-profits to join. It also allows organizations to collect tax-exempt donations in both Israeli shekels and U.S. dollars.
“We have three social collaborators [financial supporters],” said Ben-Dor, adding that they preferred to remain anonymous at this point. “And part of our income comes from the two-and-a-half percent service fee for every donation made.”
Since beginning its online work just under a year ago as a pilot site, IsraelGives has already raised a total of some $400,000 for Israel’s third sector – roughly $30,000 a month, Ben-Dor estimates. Now that the Web site is official, however, he hopes it will collect more for the struggling sector.”