It is not often that when shopping for gifts, you get to choose from a goat, an industrial-size box of condoms, a shipment of agricultural fertiliser or a crate of schoolbooks. However, the gifts – which can be purchased on Oxfam Unwrapped, part of the UK-based charity’s website – are not delivered to your door, but to needy communities in the developing world.

Oxfam Unwrapped is just one example of how the internet is changing philanthropy. Not only is it giving individual donors an easy means of sending money or gifts to remote parts of the world. The web also allows the rapid spread of information about pressing social and environmental problems. Moreover, it is providing a forum for the exchange of knowledge and ideas between charities and non-profit groups, facilitating a more “open source” approach to finding solutions to seemingly intractable problems.