Use “Good Search” for Charity
June 27, 2007
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Today’s Magic Wand: New Fairy Godmother Deborah Gardner of One Heart Bulgaria suggests using www.Good Search.com for your internet searches as they’ll give 1 penny per search to your favorite charity. If you use it put it on your tool bar so that you remember to use it and eventually it will add up…if you search as much as I do! 
This is awesome! I do so many searches a day, it’s bound to add up. Thanks for the info!
Yes, it does add up and it’s the most simple thing to set up, even for computer-challenged people like myself, and it doesn’t cost you a dime. If just 500 people make only 4 searches a day, it adds up to $7,300 a year for that charity! Not bad, eh? All you have to do is indicate on GoodSearch.com which charity you want your surfing pennys to go to. If you don’t already have one in mind, One Heart Bulgaria would love your support!
This is not about GoodSearch in particular, but about the incentives for charity ad market in general.
Sadly, a very large number of the charity incentive programs have proven scams. Those that aren’t usually only have a marginal benefit for charity but do great damage to the market at large.
In the United States, the average businessman ends up giving something like 15% to 20% of their money to charity. A company advertising that they give 10% of their profits to charity is actually giving less than the charity would have received if you did business with people who don’t wear their giving on their sleaves.
Companies advertising that they give 50% to charity are pulling a bit of a slight of hand. If giving 50% of your profit to charity increases it tenfold, then you increase your profit five fold by claiming altruism.
Even worse, some companies use the promise of giving to charity to justify nasty business practices. A case in point is the legion of Spyware and Parasiteware companies that claim to give to charity. These companies have caused a great deal of damage with very little benefit.
This GoodSeach.com is just an incentivized click play. Incentivized marketing has been a scurge on the internet. Much of the activity borders on fraud. No matter how you slice it, committing fraud for a charity is still fraud.
Let’s say, for example, that a group of kids wanted to raise money for a summer trip at their local charity through GoodSearch. To get the money, they click on a couple thousand Yahoo PPC ads.
All of the money that they raised ends up coming out of the ad budgets of the advertiser. I’ve known several small startups who lost the bulk of their ad budget on PPC campaigns to find that the traffic was inscentivized tripe.
An incentivized click for charity play might give a small amount of cash to a charity. Unfortunately, that big pile of cash, however, comes out of the pockets of people who would have benefitted from an honest PPC market.
I applaud people who give effort and money to charities.
I recommend steering clear of any advertising effort as part of an advertising campaign.
BTW, if you are involved in a charity that wants to make money with searches. I suspect that the charity would make more money by running Yahoo or Google Adsense directly, than they would by running GoodSearch.
Kevin,
Thank you for your concern, but just to ease your worries, GoodSearch has been endorsed by Oprah Winfrey, The Wall Street Journal, USA Today, ABC News and so on. Funds generated through GoodSearch’s program have been used to support the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation; pediatric cancer programs; and more than 22,000 non-profits and schools. I understand that there are many scams out there, but this is not one of them.
GoodSearch warns against abusing the system or in other words those who “click away” on every site, just so that the pennies add up. Apparently, they try to somehow monitor “abusers” of the system and disqualify them from the program. In spite of so much clicking around, the domains that are paying the costs to advertize, are still finding it profitable to advertize through Yahoo’s GoodSearch.
Many companies and business are in need of good PR as well as tax write-offs so more and more are finding ways to make a difference in their communities or in some spot in the world. They might as well. In my searching for grant opportunities for my own non-profit, I have discovered that it isn’t just the Bill Gate’s Foundation or Wal-Mart or Oprah who are giving major grants out each year to several different non-proits. Pizza chains, clothing companies, grocery stores, magazines, etc. are all doing it too. I don’t know exactly how much profit the actual corporations are making before they donate the contributions to charity. I guess that is where the donor needs to do their own research. But there ARE good people and incredible organizations out there who are willing to give to non-prifits/charities. That being said, it is still very difficult to keep a non-profit alive and to actually win those grants. It is hard to get funding period! A $50 donation from 100 people a year will not keep you afloat (although it CAN help get you through another month). What non-profits need are endowments, hefty personal contributions, and a team of fundraisers and marketing directors. We also need things like GoodSearch that can make fundraising a little easier.
My organization used to give 100% of contributions to the orphans we serve, but after 2 years of doing that, even with no paid USA staff, we found we just couldn’t keep afloat with our overhead (international phone calls, website domain, mailing costs, international banking fees, etc.). Now we have promised our donors that 90% of their donation will go to the orphans with only 10% of their donation going to overhead. And we have stuck to our promise. This low overhead is almost unheard of and we are very proud of it.
I know their are scams out there, but there are also honest people and businesses too. Contributors definitely need to do their homework and research so that they donate to worthy and honest causes.
Just as a second witness here…Fairy Godmother Sarah Lewis our sponsor and internet expert of Blogging Expertise said that Good Search is legit and that her mother’s church has received checks from them and that they received reports of when searches took place, etc.
Great to know!
Thank you!!!