Good to Know: Click and Give

By Desiree Parker Sunday, March 14, 2010

I won’t beat a dead horse and tell you again how the still-suffering economy is a baseball-bat-to-the-knees for local nonprofits. They’re hurting for funds.

People are cutting back on their charitable giving because they just can’t afford it most of the time – but there’s a company out there that’s figured out a way to get money from you to a nonprofit without taking any of your (or the nonprofit’s) money.

How could that possibly work?

In 2005, Ken Ramberg started a Los Angeles-based company called GoodSearch, which is a search engine powered by Yahoo. You put a little GoodSearch toolbar on your browser, and each time you use that to search for something online, the charity of your choice gets one penny.

The charity pays nothing, and neither do you. The company splits profits for ad sales with Yahoo, and gives half of its earnings to nonprofits.
So far, GoodSearch has over 88,000 nonprofits on its lists, including the United Way of Greater Williamsburg. According to Marketing and Volunteer Coordinator Zena Myall, the UWGW has raised over $300 in the last three years with GoodSearch – that’s a lot of pennies! Most other local nonprofits are also registered, Myall says.

A few hundred dollars doesn’t seem like much, but every penny counts in this economy – literally.

The national Cystic Fibrosis Foundation has earned $13,000 so far, according to the GoodSearch Web site.

Along with GoodSearch, Ramberg also has created GoodShop, where up to 30 percent of each purchase goes to the charity of your choice. Lest you think there’s nothing you want to buy here, there are coupons for Amazon.com, the Apple Store, Barnes & Noble, Best Buy, Expedia, Home Depot, Taget, and tons of others.

Though the company has gotten a lot of press exposure (here http://www.goodsearch.com/press.aspx are links to stories by O magazine, the New York Times, and others), I’m surprised more people haven’t started using this. I just made it my search engine, and it took no time at all.

Maybe people are suspicious, and think there’s a catch. No one will get your private info, send you stuff, or otherwise harass you. It takes literally a few seconds to navigate to the GoodSearch page (or even less time if you add their search toolbar to your Web browser or make it your preferred search engine).

There. I just donated one penny to the United Way. Wait – make that two pennies. Now it’s three. I could do this all day.

Other stuff going on
At 8 p.m. this coming Friday, Willam and Mary is hosting its first annual Dance Marathon to raise money for the nonprofit PASHN. About 20 groups of students will be dancing all night long at the Student Recreation Center. All kinds of different dance styles, along with student DJs – if only they’d done this while I was a student there!

The groups are raising money to participate, and the funds will all go to PASHN. The public is welcome to stop by and watch – here’s a &feature=related">link to a You Tube video of some of the dancers. Sounds like fun!

The United Way will be holding their annual meeting Monday at 5 p.m. at the Community Building on Boundary Street. They'll be discussing where they are with the annual campaign. Bob Graves, the 2009 Board President will conduct the meeting and Marshall Warner, 2009 Campaign Chair, will recognize business supporters and give the campaign update. Incoming Board members will also be recognized.

The community is invited to attend. Call the office at 253-2264 to RSVP.