Ms. Martin is not a civil rights leader. She’s a Brooklyn-based writer who, five years ago, was shocked to find herself in possession of a six-figure book advance. She wanted to give a chunk of it away, but was not sure how. So she decided she would make it someone else’s problem — nine other people’s problems. She chose nine thoughtful friends, gave them each $100, and told them they would be expected to account for what they had done with it at a gathering a month later.

Heart-warming high jinks have ensued ever since. Saturday night marked the fourth annual dance-crazed celebration of what Ms. Martin calls the Secret Society for Creative Philanthropy. Since that first year, Ms. Martin has been joined by several other small-time philanthropists, who bestow multiples of $100 on admired acquaintances. This year 16 inductees committed creative acts of kindness, some of them kooky, most of them thoughtful.

Someone is publishing the writing of New York students in a nonprofit literacy program. Someone else bought a video camera for a public high school in Canarsie, Brooklyn. One recipient, who runs a Web site to encourage female writers, decided to give the money to the most frequent commenter on the site, who turned out to be a former correction officer with dreams of a life in the arts. Several people doubled down by donating $100 of their own money, part of the ripple effect that so often gives small, charmed gestures reach beyond their scope. (The ripples go as far as San Francisco and Athens, Ga., where others have started their own chapters of the Secret Society.)

There’s nothing original or YouTube-worthy about sending $100 to help in Haiti, but people did that, too, which also thrilled Ms. Martin (who said she also gave considerably more money to traditional nonprofits). “I could not argue giving away 100 flowers is as important as giving money to Paul Farmer,” Ms. Martin said of the anthropologist who helped found the medical charity Partners in Health. But, she added, there’s something to be said for “a visceral engagement with joy and spontaneity, and injecting more of that into our lives.”

It’s a great technological trick that it now takes no more than a text message to send $10 to Haiti. But with that simplicity comes a certain passivity. There is a benefit, too, to having a creative challenge built into some personal charitable giving — innovation of all kinds requires ownership, reinvention, elaborate consideration.