Jas sends along some information about a new virtual initiative by the UK charity World Vision:
Copper Industries have recently built a village in Second
Life for World Vision UK,
one of the world's leading development and relief charities. The aim of the
village is to show some of the products you can purchase through their
Alternative Gift Catalogue
within a community context. (Direct Teleport SLURL.) It was seen as a way we could make the gift
catalogue products a little more real/tangible (as real as you can in a virtual
environment) and provide a bit of an education.
It looks quite similar to Save the Children's Yak Shack I wrote about last week, but with more products. So far it looks pretty sweet. More pictures and commentary below….
Here are some of the products you can check out before you purchase them online.
Here I am milking a dairy cow that you can purchase for a family in Kenya for 574 pounds.
You can also get school books and supplies for kids in Darinbadi India for only 8 pounds.
A "bog" is apparently a British euphemism for toilet. You can purchase a toilet for someone in Malawi or Armenia for only 32 pounds!
A cooking pot for a school in Angola is a steal at 29 pounds!
All in all, I like the idea of the virtual village linked to a charitable donation. It would be nice to have more context provided about what the donations are going toward though. Links to the website are good, but in-world notecards, pictures, video or anything else to contextualize the donations would be great. Providing some ambient sound, either world music or maybe a welcome audio message from World Vision would be nice too.
Anyway, it's a great effort which I hope helps generate more buzz and contributions for the good work of World Vision.
I’m really heartened by seeing this, because it seems to me somebody has finally figured out a way to combine the 3-D emotional bandwidth quality of SL for display and communication with an effective donation strategy.
And I just wanted to say too that I agree, more videos/notecards would be good, but they do have some. What I’d do if I were them is to have those bogs actually able to be purchased in Lindens. That is, to have something that can be paid for right there in micropayments. Not every single thing there — it might not be feasible as the RL costs might be great — but something for say, $1000 or $2000 that would mean something.
If the avatar then got an object inworld for that same purchase, that would go to help a RL person, say, a pencil that really went to a RL school, that could be effective.