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Google and Yahoo compete for our questions and curiosities. Now they both lend their powerful search engines to help us give back and get involved in our communities.
Yahoo powers GoodSearch.com, a regular search engine except you support a charity of your choice with every search. How? Type in your query, select a cause-of-choice (or add one to the list), hit search and magically money goes to the selected charity while you get your standard search results. Actually there’s no magic involved. GoodSearch.com funds this operation by designating 50% of their ad revenue to share with charities, schools, or non-profit organizations; they let users decide where this money goes.
Born from the minds and work of volunteers from Google, CraigsList Foundation, UCLA, YouTube, FanFeedr, and Aha! Ink, AllForGood.org is a place to find and share volunteer opportunities. Google acts as host to the website and related products. The great thing about AllForGood.org is that instead of sifting through pages of events, users search by typing in their interests such as the environment, health care, or education. Then users get a listing of all the events in their area related to their specified interest. Other perks include a map showing where in town these events are and the option to see events happening today, this weekend, this week, or this month, and the ultimate iphone/ipod touch apps such as the AllForGood Gadget and Catalista!
In the process of researching for this piece I stumbled upon another way to give back by communicating. Similar to GoodSearch.com, Microsoft provides “Emailing for the Greater Good.” This allows those with hotmail accounts or those who use Windows Live Messenger to give to a charity with every email and IM. Microsoft offers a menu of organizations users can choose to help. Where GoodSearch.com allows users to enter local charities and schools, Emailing for the Greater Good sticks with national and international non-profits such as The Red Cross, The Humane Society of the United States, and UNICEF to name a few. According to their website they’ve raised almost $2.5 million since March of 2007.
As a Gmail user I’m hoping Google will start their own donation-through-email program by announcing that the G in Gmail does not just stand for “Google” but for “Give” and “Good” too.
Know creative new ways to give back and get involved? Please “give back” by sharing your philanthropic strategies and techniques with us.
Contributed by Laine Beyerl