Give the gift of
clicks — to charity
By
Bob Sullivan
MSNBC © 2000
Dec.
24 — You probably can’t get something for nothing, but
perhaps you can give something for nothing. A number of Web
site have popped up that take advantage of the crazy
economics of the Internet. Just by visiting, you make a
donation to a worthy cause. The donations are small —
usually a half-cent for a visit, paid by a sponsor — but
they add up. The most popular of these “click-to-give”
sites, thehungersite.com, regularly receives over 300,000
clicks a day, which translates into more than 100,000 pounds
of food donated to a U.N. world hunger program.
IT ALL STARTED in June when 42-year-old
Indiana programmer John Breen decided he wanted to make a
difference and help educate poor children around the world.
Breen learned quickly that the major obstacle to education
is often not lack of books but lack of food. So he set up
his Web site and settled on the U.N.’s World Food Program
as the donation recipient.
The site works like this: Users arrive and
are greeted by a dramatic world map. Every 3.6 seconds, a
nation somewhere on the globe flashes black, indicating
someone has died of hunger. Then users are given the
opportunity to click on a single link to participate in the
fund-raising. After clicking, donors are presented with 10
or 12 small advertisements from corporate sponsors, who pay
half a penny each for your click. On Wednesday, that
translated into 6 cents donated for every visitor.
Web surfers can only donate once a day.
The site asks for no private information, but it does record
your Internet address to ensure you’re not clicking more
often than that.
LABOR OF LOVE
Sponsors right now end up paying about
$1,500 per day, and the money goes directly to the World
Food Program. Breen doesn’t get paid for his efforts; in
fact, the site’s popularity has become overwhelming, and
he had to quit his full-time job to baby-sit it.
“I thought it would be a quiet thing in
its own little niche,” Breen said via e-mail. He’s
stopped doing telephone interviews because he doesn’t have
time any more.
The success of the site has Abby Spring,
World Food Program spokesperson, beaming — and not just
because of the financial donations. Her job is to tell the
world about the World Food Program’s 5,000 staff members
and their daily efforts to feed 75 million hungry people
around the world. It’s usually an uphill battle.
| |
Monthly
donations |
|
| |
|
|
| |
The
figures below show the monthly donations
made to The Hunger Site and the average
number of sponsors per month. |
|
| |
Month
Totals |
Avg
# of Sponsors |
Cups
of Food |
|
| |
November |
7.9 |
13,393,023 |
|
| |
October |
5.3 |
6,341,680 |
|
| |
September |
6.0 |
3,742,144 |
|
| |
August |
4.5 |
2,258,060 |
|
| |
July |
n/a |
1,959,891 |
|
| |
June |
n/a |
259,109 |
|
|
“There is a huge disconnect between what
the U.N. does in the field and what the general public knows
about us,” she said. “The site is great because not only
are people contributing, but the fact that more and more
people understand what we do. The Internet is an excellent
tool to reach out to thousands around the world who
otherwise would not be aware of the World Food Program.”
She said Breen first contacted the U.N.
earlier this year, and the organization’s reaction was,
“What is he getting out of it?” They learned Breen
really does just want to help the poor.
“He has a card table with a computer on
it in a warehouse,” Spring said. “This is not somebody
doing this to make contacts.”
One of the Hunger Site’s first sponsors
was Proflowers.com. The company, which is dedicated to
“cause marketing,” heard about the click-to-donate site
via world of mouth.
“We
were really impressed with what he was trying to do,” said
vice president of business development Barbara Bry. “It
was one of those ideas that when we heard it, we said,
‘Why didn’t we think of that?’ ”
So far, Proflowers has donated about
$100,000 to the World Food Program, a bit more than the
company expected. “We’ve been surprised by the growth in
traffic to his site,” Bry said.
IMITATION, A FORM OF FLATTERY
Breen’s success has attracted a healthy
list of sponsors; it’s starting to include household names
like Sprint. It has also spawned imitators; there are now at
least two other sites where single clicks are turned into
corporate donations.
Thehumanitariansite.org works on the same
half-penny-per-click-per-sponsor model; it launched earlier
this month. Donations there fund Cross Cultural Solutions, a
group that organizes “volunteer vacations.” Participants
pay about $2,000 to work for three weeks in places like
India, Peru and Kosovo. Proceeds from
thehumanitariansite.org are intended to lower or eliminate
program fees.
Freedonation.com launched Nov. 15, and has
already generated about 20,000 clicks, according to site
developer Niuniu Ji. A 20-year-old senior at Case Western
University, Ji says he’s donating proceeds from his site
to the World Health Organization.
THE CHARITY FROGS
Then there’s the Charity Frogs, which
operates on a slightly different model. Founders Tony Hsieh
and Alfred Lin, both 26, made millions selling their startup
LinkExchange to Microsoft. (Microsoft is a partner in
MSNBC.) So they’re donating $1 million to the American Red
Cross. But they’re doing it $1 at a time; $1 for every
visitor to their Charity-frogs.net Web site.
Donations
by country
| |
The figures
below show the top ten donations to The
Hunger Site by country. |
|
| |
United
States |
16,336,598 |
|
| |
Brazil |
1,189,260 |
|
| |
Canada |
838,766 |
|
| |
United
Kingdom |
652,061 |
|
| |
Sweden |
522,241 |
|
| |
Australia |
515,663 |
|
| |
Germany |
405,328 |
|
| |
Normay |
394,055 |
|
| |
France |
230,581 |
|
| |
Netherlands |
222,883 |
|
| |
Italy |
196,019 |
|
|
“We thought it was kind of boring to just
send a check and write it off,” Hsieh said. “We thought
this would not only be fun and an interesting experiment,
but it would also raise awareness.” So far, they’ve
raised about $20,000.
The charity’s name takes after the
pair’s new project — Venture Frogs, a venture capital
company they founded with their Microsoft money.
“It’s been very heartwarming. The
beauty of the Net community is it’s a very generous
group,” said American Red Cross spokesperson Ann Andrews.
She said the Red Cross Web site has already raised $2.5
million on its own this year. Within a day of the Venezuelan
environmental disaster, $40,000 was donated on the Red Cross
site.
“We are very fortunate,” Andrews said.
“People are always willing to give to the Red Cross.”
The Charity Frogs aren’t taking
sponsorships. Hsieh and Lin are simply donating their own
money. But the other sites aren’t merely taking corporate
donations — they offer good will and real advertising
power to companies. Breen claims click-through rates on his
site exceed those of traditional banner ads, and Bry agrees.
“We have gotten customers as a
result of our sponsorship, and we get a lot of positive
e-mails,” she said. But the sponsorship is hardly a pure
business decision. “There are less expensive ways to
acquire customers.”
Related Links:
Thehungersite.com
-- donates to the UN's World Food Program
Freedonation.com
-- donates to the World Health Organization
Thehumanitariansite.org
-- donates to Cross Cultural Solutions
Charity-frogs.net
-- donates to the American Red Cross
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