In August 2012, together with his wife Linda, John Arnold launched The Giving Library. This $4m project is a collection of videos featuring the works of 250 charities. The idea is that philanthropists can use the data from the Library to facilitate learning what they need to know about the nonprofits. The Giving Library was launched because when Linda and John Arnold started their philanthropic journey, they found it challenging to figure out which nonprofits were most worthy and in need of support. Spending so much time on searches and meeting with executive directors is not necessarily the most efficient use of everyone’s time so once they had done it, they developed this resource to save others’ time.
Until the Giving Library was established, most philanthropists were only able to access details from a few worthy organizations. Thus foundation executive directors had to spend way too much time on fundraising. As Laura Arnold explained, “we saw a need to create more efficiency in the system to have a more organized vision of receiving and processing information on nonprofits.” John added, “we started to do our own research, trying to go to websites to read about nonprofits. We realized we got much more insight by speaking to the founder. If you have significant resources, it’s worth their time to sit down and meet a particular funder but that’s not always practical for the majority of funder or nonprofits.”
The Arnolds thus took it upon themselves to film the work of worthy organizations and made the short documentaries Internet accessible so that these people could tell their stories and reach a much larger audience. They also sent letters to nonprofits – any organization that they had received confirmation was a legitimate nonprofit. They then began working with some of these places to help them improve their scripts. This is an ongoing project which has already helped save a lot of time of many willing philanthropists.
