Monday, June 11, 2007

Few free ways to support causes via the internet

The largest list of Click to Donate websites I have found is at The Nonprofits website. The point of these websites is to donate money to various causes by clicking on a banner. The websites donate some money obtained by their sponsors to charities. I like the idea of helping people with very little effort needed (after all, you only have to load the page and click on a banner). So if you have a fast Internet connection, if your on a slow dial-up it probably is not worth your time, click on some of these. Of course it is much better for you to just donate some money yourself or do volunteer work but every little bit helps. While these do help a very little bit, the actual donating is not the best things about them. The spreading of knowledge is the best things about the sites.

Sites I encountered not on the Nonprofits website's list (at the time I wrote this):
* Cause clicks - multiple causes
* Free Kibble - donates to animal shelters to feed dogs also has a link to feed cats as well.
* Semi-Arid Campaign - Donates water (has an English version as well but that was not working when I tried it.

Additional ways to support causes:
Websearch for charity:
* Charity Cafe used to use Lycos and Ask.com search engine and the money they got from referring you to the search engine went to a charity. They no longer do so but Charity Cafe is trying to get a different search provider.

Web based learning games that also donate to charities as you play (some listed on The Nonprofits are not listed here). These are better than the click to donate sites in that their purpose is as much to teach as it is to donate.
* Free Rice - learn English vocabulary and basic grammar, basic mathematics, a foreign language, pediatric table of elements, countries of the world and their capitals, and Famous paintings. For every answer you get correct some rice goes to feed some one, some where.
* Give Vaccines - learn English vocabulary, Medical Terminology or about Business. Every correct answer donates to giving vaccinations.
* Aid to Children - learning vocabulary that donates to children (the vocabulary game is inferior to the above two sites).
* Free Poverty - learn geography different from free rice in that it has a map of the world and you have to point out where the country and city (or land mark) is.

Care2 has a toolbar add-on for your Internet browser that helps reduce the carbon released into the atmosphere. It also will tell you the weather around the world, give links to several click to donate things (makes it faster to click on them), and will check your care2 email, Yahoo email, Hotmail email, and Google email (logs onto the various emails by just clicking on the bar).

The Ecology Fund will give a much larger donation if you subscribe to newsletters about the environment from their site (you can always subscribe with an email address you rarely check or a temporary email address).

Windows Live™ Messenger (instant messaging software), Microsoft will donate a portion of its advertising revenue to the National MS Society. So if your going to use an IM might as well use one that helps someone.

Various petition sites to get the government or various people/industries to do something/stop doing something: Care2, Petition Spot, Petitions.org, and Petition Online are some sites with petitions.

There are several sites that will give a portion of a purchase to charity. For instance if you are planning to buy something from amazon.com click on a link to amazon.com from one of the charity sites instead of going there directly so that some portion of it goes to the charity.

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