Web-search clicks rack up dough for charities
Posted on Sunday, October 8, 2006
Matt Cleveland searches for troubled teens. Michael Brown searches for juvenile diabetics. A charity benefits.
A new kind of Internet search engine lets Web surfers pick a charity to share the revenue generated by their clicks. At least two dozen Arkansas nonprofits are promoting the novel fundraising approach in hopes of grabbing a sliver of the $ 6 billion advertising business that has grown up around online search engines.
At a penny a click, the donations add up excruciatingly slowly. But charity fund-raisers called GoodSearch. com’s business model a creative idea that can deliver a little extra money for good causes without costing the charities or their supporters anything.
“Every little bit helps,” said Darlene Bourgeois, director of St. Francis House.
The Little Rock charity for the homeless and the poor has racked up 9, 276 clicks — worth $ 92. 76 — since enrolling with GoodSearch in March, according to the search engine’s online database of beneficiaries.
“Why not ?” said Brown, a customer-service representative in Tyson Foods’ Springdale headquarters who often chooses GoodSearch. com instead of Google so that his searches benefit the Northwest Arkansas branch of Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation International. Brown’s daughter has diabetes.
In Little Rock, Cleveland, who is the annual-giving coordinator for Youth Home, said he uses GoodSearch himself and has e-mailed several friends asking them to use the search to help the center for troubled teens.
Most Arkansas charities were well below the $ 100 they must have accumulated by Sept. 30 to receive a 2006 distribution check. Charities that are short can carry their totals over to 2007, said J. J. Ramberg, who co-founded GoodSearch as a for-profit company with her brother, Ken. If the designated charity still has less than $ 100 after two years, the money will be distributed to a national nonprofit such as the United Way, instead.
GoodSearch started the business last November under a partnership with Yahoo. Ramberg declined to reveal terms. But she said a GoodSearch search is nearly identical to a Yahoo search. Only, about half the money — it comes from advertisers who pay when users click their links — goes to the charity selected as the search beneficiary.
Ramberg said the company is still totaling amounts after last week’s deadline and can’t say how many checks or how much money will be distributed. An elephant preserve in Tennessee rolled up clicks worth $ 1, 700, she said, and organizers of a charity dance marathon at Penn State University have about $ 1, 200.
Heifer International in Little Rock appears to have the most in Arkansas — $ 238. Unlike some other charities, Heifer hasn’t promoted GoodSearch to its supporters, said public-information director Ray White. But bloggers and GoodSearch itself have promoted the idea of harnessing the search engine for Heifer.
“This is really a freebie for us,” White said.
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