Fund-Raising Site Seeks to Raise $700-Million for British Charities

British nonprofit groups are hoping that a new video-sharing Web site called See the Difference, which went live this week, will meets it goal to raise $700-million for charity by 2015.

Using the site, donors can watch videos and contribute to projects depicted on film by more than 100 registered charities in the UK. In return, they receive feedback from the organization by e-mail. The site encourages donors to send the videos to their friends and to post them on blogs and social-networking sites.

See the Difference has drawn an impressive array of corporate backers, including Microsoft, McCann Erickson, and other big companies.

But some observers doubt that See the Difference will spur much giving. One of them is Mark Phillips, the founder of Bluefrog, a London fund-raising consulting company. “I’ve had a good look around the site and watched a fair number of videos,” Mr. Phillips wrote in his blog. “It looks like most have been created by people who don’t know much about fund raising.”

Mr. Phillips says too many of the videos are all about what each charity will do with the money it raises, rather than engaging the donor. “Good fund raising is about showing the donor what he or she can do,” he writes. “At its simplest, it’s about saying ‘you’ much more often than you say ‘we,’ See the Difference is far too ‘we.’”

He also thinks the new site should be easier to browse, and its videos should be better labeled so that viewers know at a glance what problem or issue the charity is trying to tackle.

What’s your take on See the Difference? Take a tour of the site and give us your review below.