Skip to main content

Five Ways to Give Back Through Social Media

Focused as many of us are on our own companies' or clients' economic anxieties, it's easy to forget that downturns (or even the perceptions of downturns) hit non-profit organizations particularly hard. When money is tight, charitable giving is an easy, if unfortunate, area to cut. In response, non-profits are getting more creative in using social media and other online tools to provide people with more ways to contribute than simply reaching for nearly-empty wallets.

1. GoodSearch/GoodShop

One example is GoodSearch.com, a search engine that makes a donation for every search, and it's partner organization GoodShop.com, an online shopping mall with more than 700 leading retailers that directs a percentage of every sale to the user's favorite charity.

According to GoodSearch.com co-founder JJ Ramberg, with gas prices rising and the housing market already in a slump, economic fears have led to a drop in charitable contributions nationwide, making it harder for non-profits to keep up with an increased demand for their services. As donations get pinched, many are refocusing their fundraising efforts.

"GoodSearch.com and GoodShop.com...allow supporters to give to their favorite organizations without spending a dime. GoodSearch.com is the Yahoo-powered search engine that donates a penny per search to the charity or school of the users’ choice. GoodShop donates a percentage of every purchase from (participating) retailers." Over 60,000 nonprofits across the country are actively earning funds from the GoodSearch and GoodShop strategy with over 100 organizations submitting new applications daily. Success stories range from the ASPCA which has earned more than $15,000 to care for animals to the Bubel Aiken Foundation which has earned more than $8,000 to send disabled children to summer camp.

2. iBakeSale.com

GoodSearch is unique (as far as I know). GoodShop is similar to iBakeSale.com, which now has more than 300 participating merchants, and provides rebates averaging 8% that can be directed to the charity of the shopper's choice. iBakeSale was founded about a year ago by Jonathan Treiber. Where GoodShop is geared toward supporting large national non-profits, iBakeSale is ideal for local fundraising (sports teams, church groups etc.) plus larger schools and charities.

3. Idea.org

Non-profit group Idea.org is involved in a number of interesting projects relating to how people interact with the online world. For example, their Vision Simulator tool helps web designers understand how people with different types of vision impairment see the web. The organization recently published a study entitled Factors That Improve Online Experiences, which explored factors that drive online experience as expressed by the three different subject groups – nonprofit organizations and cities, web designers and firms, and the general public.

4. All About Pets

As reported by Kristen Nicole on Mashable, "The Blue Cross, a UK-based pet charity, is hoping to drive some traffic to its new website, allaboutpets, with an Oddcast-powered viral marketing scheme that is sure to get some attention. The Oddcast talking avatars, which can be customized at TalkingPets.org, are being put to use in a campaign that’s quite similar to Elf Yourself, where users can choose a pet avatar or upload an image of their own pet." The Blue Cross is Britain’s pet charity, providing support, information and advice for pet and horse owners. The charity relies on donations and fundraising for its income. AllAboutPets is essentially a social networking site for British pet owners.

5. Zanby

Zanby is a group-oriented social networking site. It enables virtually any type of group—family, business, club etc.—to set up its own social networking space, but is somewhat more geared toward non-profit and charitable groups than are sites like Ning. For example, the site is used by Engineers Without Borders, a non-profit humanitarian organization established to partner with developing communities worldwide in order to improve their quality of life.

Until things improve, as Red Green says, "I'm pulling for you. We're all in this together."

*****

Contact Tom Pick: tomATwebmarketcentralDOTcom

Comments

Cameron said…
WOW! Thank you so much for this post. I had NO idea any of these site's existed. We run a non-profit in the Philadelphia area(Boot Camps With A Purpose) in which we offer free fitness Boot Camps to the public each Saturday in exchange for donations. It's really starting to pick up steam. I applied to goodsearch and goodshop this morning! Thank you again - great info!

Cameron
Boot Camps With A Purpose
http://bcwap.blogspot.com
Tom Pick said…
Cameron -- thanks, it's very gratifying to hear that you found this helpful. Best of luck to you and your organization.
Seo said…
This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.

All Time Greats

Getting More Out of Each Click with "Post-Click Marketing"

With the economy now officially in a recession (as if we didn't know that), marketers are under increasing pressure to do more with less. On the interactive marketing side, few marketers will get budget increases enabling them to drive more clicks. The challenge, then, is to maximize marketing productivity—to get more leads out of the same number of clicks. This is the first of two posts that will look at how to improve conversion rates to get more value from each click. One answer to this challenge is provided by "post-click marketing," a.k.a. lead automation management vendors. While the specifics of each service vary, all of them essentially: automate the process of extracting visitor IP information from your log files; match the IP address to an organization; filter out ISPs; and map the company name to one or more external databases to provide additional information (company size, industry, key contacts etc.). The better services also use geo-location filte

Top Notch Digital Marketing Tip: Google AdWords and PPC

MARKETING: 101 Looking for some online marketing strategy or social media tips to grow your business? Well, you’ve come to the right digital marketing resource! Web Market Central has been doling out the proper digital marketing advice for years. And as you already know, marketing to customers online is 100 times easier than using dated, expensive and traditional marketing tactics. Like seriously, who uses billboards in 2019? But you already know how effective digital marketing can be in the modern age. So now that you're totally convinced of what you already knew, let’s give you today's top-notch digital marketing tip! The Pure Unfettered Power of PPC (Pay-Per-Click) and PPC Campaigns Just like optimizing your site to rank for keywords, you can use our online marketing tips to pay to run advertisements on Google so that your business is shown on the first page of search engine results. Ranking this way is instantaneous whereas SEO (Search Engine Optimizati

How to Use SEO: Leverage SEO To Be Found Online and Boost Your Online Marketing

All businesses that want to attract customers online, no matter the business size or age, have few options other than Search Engine Optimization (SEO).  SEO In The Box™ by Results Driven Marketing®, LLC There are roughly 1.8 billion websites online, and basic SEO allows Google to find and index or catalog your webpages.  After that, Google serves you up to searchers in the organic section.  The question remains: where they list your site, on page one or page 22 or further back? SEO controls your positioning. Do you want to be found online or not? If your business is online or you want your product or service to be found online, then Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a must, and knowing how to use SEO to leverage the power of the internet is vital. Arguably, an effective SEO strategy gets you on the organic results section of the search engine results pages (SERP). Organic traffic is highly valuable and requires high-quality SEO. But even businesses that use l

Marketo Releases Marketo Lead Management 3.0

Marketing automation software vendor Marketo today announced the launch of its Marketo Lead Management 3.0 software suite. With more than 200 new features, the release is the most significant since the product's initial launch in early 2008. Promising deeper support for a "conversational model of marketing," the new release provides 75 user interface enhancements as well as new features including: More fine-grained control over segmentation, targeting, and triggering; "Progressive profiling" on forms (i.e. additional profile is requested as a prospect moves through an interactive process); Native integration with Salesforce.com ; Web visitor profiling; and Automated duplicate lead removal. Pricing starts at $1,500 per month and the company now has more than 150 midmarket and enterprise customers. Marketo competes with products such as Eloqua , Silverpop Engage B2B (formerly Vtrenz), and Manticore in the marketing automation / demand generation sp

Top Notch Digital Marketing Tip: Optimize Your Site

Looking for some online marketing tips to grow your business? Well, you’ve come to the right digital marketing resource! Web Market Central has been doling out the proper digital marketing advice for years. And as you already know, marketing to customers online is 100 times easier than using dated, expensive and traditional marketing tactics. Like seriously, who uses billboards in 2019? But you already know how effective digital marketing and an seo strategy can be in the modern age. So now that you're totally convinced of what you already knew, let’s give you today's top-notch digital marketing tip! Optimize Your Site to Improve Search Engine Rankings Most small business owners know that their websites need to be optimized in order for search engines, like Google and Bing, to find them and rank them on the search engine results page. If you don’t know, that’s okay. You can learn all about Search Engine Optimization and SEO best practices here to help impr

Top-Notch Digital Marketing Tip: Advertisements That Make Sense

MARKETING: 101 Looking for some online marketing tips to grow your business? Well, you’ve come to the right digital marketing resource ! Web Market Central has been doling out the proper DM advice for years. And as you already know, marketing to customers online is 100 times easier than using dated, expensive and traditional marketing tactics. Like seriously, who uses billboards in 2019? But you already know how effective Digital Marketing can be in the modern age. So now that you're totally convinced of what you already knew, let’s give you today's top notch-digital marketing tip! Advertisement Congruence If your business is running ads this is one of our most important online marketing tips! Ad congruence is when your ads and landing pages look alike or have the same message. Have you ever clicked on an ad and been taken to a page that looked nothing like the ad? When your ads look like the web pages they lead to, customers will feel like they are in

The Best Web Marketing of 2008

Which types of online advertising provide the highest ROI? Who's really clicking on your PPC ads? Why do PPC costs keep rising? How can you convert more clickers into buyers? Are Web 2.0 technologies now mainstream? Learn these answers and more from this collection of blog posts and articles, some of the best reporting on online research topics so far this year. Online Marketers See High ROI from SEO by Marketing Pilgrim Blogger, SEO expert and PR pro Janet Meiners reports on an MarketingSherpa study detailing the growth in paid search and organic search engine optimization. Read her post to discover which types of online advertising get a thumbs up—and which are losing favor with interactive marketers. Who's really clicking? by iMedia Connection Sandeep Krishnamurthy , Professor of Marketing and E-Commerce at the University of Washington, paints a bleak picture of the future of PPC advertising—then gets blasted for it in the Comments by some fairly high-profile

Marketing Automation: Bringing a Gun to a Knife Fight

This content has been moved to Marketing Automation: Like Bringing a Gun to a Knife Fight on the Webbiquity blog. ***** technorati tags: b2b marketing lead nurturing marketing-automation software demand-generation software Steve Woods Eloqua hosted-email-services email-service-providers ESP Constant Contact VerticalResponse ExactTarget shorten sales cycles del.icio.us tags: b2b marketing lead nurturing marketing-automation software demand-generation software Steve Woods Eloqua hosted-email-services email-service-providers ESP Constant Contact VerticalResponse ExactTarget shorten sales cycles icerocket tags: b2b marketing lead nurturing marketing-automation software demand-generation software Steve Woods Eloqua hosted-email-services email-service-providers ESP Constant Contact VerticalResponse ExactTarget shorten sales cycles Contact Tom Pick: tomATwebmarketcentralDOTcom