If You Give to Save the Children, You Might Also Try Contributing to …

If you purchase Barbara Ehrenreich’s book Nickel and Dimed through Amazon.com chances are the Web site will suggest you try reading other books on poverty in America, along with similar nonfiction works such as Eric Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation.

Music sites such as Pandora work similarly, providing users with recommendations for new music based on artists they have chosen in the past.

Lucy Bernholz, writing on Philanthropy 2173, wonders whether philanthropy could benefit from such an online recommendation service. Ms. Bernholz says she knows of two organizations that are looking into developing such sites.

But how would such a service work? Ms. Bernholz contemplates the options — and whether such a site makes sense at all.

“Do you base such algorithms on where money goes (the Amazon approach)? Or would you, as Pandora does, attempt to deconstruct nonprofit organizations into types and characteristics and then make recommendations on patterns and similarities? Or is the whole idea absurd, given that giving is both passion-driven and rational in ways that music, movies, and pop culture are simply not? Can you tell something about someone by where they give their money? Can you predict where someone will give by mining data on where they live, what they read, what kind of ice cream they buy, and whether or not they vote?”

What do you think of a recommendation site for charitable giving? How might it work?