Whittle is co-founder and chief executive officer for Global Giving, which describes itself as the world's leading online marketplace for international philanthropy.

What is global giving?

It's an online philanthropy marketplace that allows donors to give directly to organizations in the United States and overseas and know exactly where the money is going and what impact it has made.

Have people become more skeptical about charitable giving?

In most cases, money goes into one big pot and once you put your money into that pot you really have no control over where it goes. But the Web and Internet make it possible to track things much more closely than ever before, and people are just demanding that. People are increasingly unsatisfied with just throwing their money into one big pot, so we try to make it possible to go beyond that.

How did you come up with this idea?

My co-founder and I were at the World Bank for a long time and our president asked us to experiment with innovative ways of doing business. We ... solicited ideas from regular people around the world. It was so successful we decided to leave the bank and create a marketplace where regular people could send in ideas for how to improve the world and actually donate to that process.

How many donors have used the site?

Some 80,000 individual donors as well as many companies have funded around 1,600 projects in over 70 countries in the past few years alone.

Who are your donors?

It is an extremely broad swath of people. It ranges from a guy in Washington state who sends us a money order for $10 every month, and he told us his income is $10,000 a year, to a lot of regular families and people here in the Washington, D.C., area who might give $300 to a project. It also includes small family foundations ... as well as a lot of top corporations like Nike and Pepsi.

Susan Ferrechio