If the web seems increasingly about community and sharing, it only makes sense that the spirit of giving back would find its place in this evolving digisphere, and it is.
In addition to offering advantages for for-profit sites, such as credit card transactions, allowing givers to donate without having to reach into their pockets or write a check, the internet offers charities unique and often clever opportunities to draw in givers.
Some are lifted from social networking sites, others from lotteries.
“We are seeing interest in charitable giving but seeing it morph into other forms,” says Heather Dougherty, director, research at Hitwise, which tracks internet usage.
Everyclick.com, a British search engine that may come to the U.S. this year, splits its ad revenue, giving half to a range of charities. The person using Everyclick.com gives by the mere activity of conducting a search, without actually parting with a cent.
At FreeRice.com, users are offered a chance to bone up on their vocabulary, and in so doing earn grains of rice for the world's hungry, again without parting with a cent themselves. Those pennies come from advertising.
At the Hunger Site, a donation is made every time the user clicks on a yellow box. Again, the advertiser makes the actual donation.
A new twist this year was charity gift cards, which enable the receiver to donate the money to the charity of their choice. Charitable gift cards were a big search term this year for the first time, according to Hitwise.
These new forms of giving would seem to work. Everyclick, launched in June 2005, has earned nearly $750,000 for charity in Britain and is now the country’s No. 8 search engine, according to Hitwise.
FreeRice, launched in October 2007, has already donated over 13 billion grains of rice though the World Food Program, while the Hunger Site, launched in 1999, has provided $68 million pounds of food. These two sites were No. 1 and No. 2 in Hitwise’s humanitarian category in December (see chart, below).
But established charities are also benefiting from the internet.
“It has had an enormous impact,” says a spokesperson for the Institute for Philanthropy, a London non-profit that aims to raise the profile of effective philanthropy.
Those that have done best are the big charities with the resources to set up and market their online donation sites, says Salvatore LaSpada, chief executive of the Institute for Philanthropy.
Over at Save the Children, for instance, a spokesperson says that in the immediate aftermath of a disaster, most individual donors now give via the internet.
But even smaller charities are figuring out how to benefit from the internet. Now intermediary sites are emerging with information on a number of charities.
One example is Firstgiving, which works a little like a social network. Folks raising money can put up a personalized page where donors can contribute.
By the looks of things, charities have just begun to tap into the internet's true potential for raising money. Online giving is still a tiny fraction of total giving.
A study by the Chronicle of Philanthropy, a newspaper for the non-profit sector, found that online donations increased 37 percent from 2005 in 2006, rising to $1.2 billion, but for most of the 187 organizations online still represented less than 1 percent of all donations.
Meanwhile, in online ratings for the week ended Dec. 30, according to Nielsen Online, Google claimed the top spot among parent companies, followed by Microsoft, Yahoo, Time Warner and News Corp. Online. The top five brands were Google, Yahoo, MSN/Windows Live, Microsoft and AOL Media Network.
NexTag was the No. 1 advertiser with 4.1 million impressions, followed by No. 2 Netflix at 3.6 million. With 23.4 million ads served, Yahoo was again the top advertising site, well ahead of No. 2 MySpace at 1.2 million.
Sessions per person per week were down two from the previous week to 14, and domains visited per person were down three to 35 during the holiday week. PC time per person slumped more than 15 percent compared with the previous week, to 14 hours and 4 minutes.
|
Community - Humanitarian
Monthly Market Share of U.S. Visits
Rankings for the month of December 2007
|
|
Rank |
Name |
Domain |
Market Share |
|
1 |
FreeRice |
www.freerice.com |
17.96% |
|
2 |
The Hunger Site |
www.thehungersite.com |
9.62% |
|
3 |
Idealist.org |
www.idealist.org |
4.20% |
|
4 |
World Vision United States |
www.worldvision.org |
3.99% |
|
5 |
United Nations |
www.un.org |
3.57% |
|
6 |
American Red Cross |
www.redcross.org |
2.99% |
|
7 |
Heifer Project International |
www.heifer.org |
2.83% |
|
8 |
One Laptop Per Child |
www.laptop.org |
2.47% |
|
9 |
Human Rights Watch |
www.hrw.org |
2.00% |
|
10 |
Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations |
www.fao.org |
1.99% |
|
Note - the Hitwise data featured is based on U.S. market share of visits, which is the percentage of online traffic to the domain or category, from the Hitwise sample of 10 million U.S. Internet users. Hitwise measures more than 1 million unique websites on a daily basis, including sub-domains of larger websites. Hitwise categorizes websites into industries on the basis of subject matter and content, as well as market orientation and competitive context. |
|
Source: Hitwise |
|
Top 25 parent companies
Through Dec. 30 |
|
#
|
Parent
|
Unique Audience (000)
|
Reach %
|
Time Spent per Person (hh:mm:ss)
|
|
1
|
Google
|
82,903
|
60.7
|
0:30:06
|
|
2
|
Microsoft
|
80,079
|
58.6
|
0:40:42
|
|
3
|
Yahoo!
|
74,808
|
54.7
|
0:54:03
|
|
4
|
Time Warner
|
62,941
|
46.1
|
1:12:30
|
|
5
|
News Corp. Online
|
42,150
|
30.8
|
0:49:45
|
|
6
|
eBay
|
31,024
|
22.7
|
0:47:30
|
|
7
|
Amazon
|
27,329
|
20.0
|
0:16:12
|
|
8
|
Apple Computer
|
26,410
|
19.3
|
0:51:01
|
|
9
|
InterActiveCorp
|
25,070
|
18.4
|
0:11:51
|
|
10
|
Wikimedia Foundation
|
18,569
|
13.6
|
0:08:24
|
|
11
|
RealNetworks, Inc.
|
18,465
|
13.5
|
0:15:34
|
|
12
|
Landmark Communications
|
17,744
|
13.0
|
0:09:45
|
|
13
|
Walt Disney Internet Group
|
17,665
|
12.9
|
0:19:02
|
|
14
|
New York Times Company
|
17,651
|
12.9
|
0:07:49
|
|
15
|
AT&T Inc.
|
16,879
|
12.4
|
0:18:47
|
|
16
|
E.W. Scripps Company
|
13,527
|
9.9
|
0:06:05
|
|
17
|
CNET Networks
|
13,190
|
9.7
|
0:07:26
|
|
18
|
Comcast Corp.
|
12,948
|
9.5
|
0:21:39
|
|
19
|
Bank of America
|
12,178
|
8.9
|
0:22:26
|
|
20
|
Wal-Mart Stores
|
12,074
|
8.8
|
0:09:54
|
|
21
|
Viacom Digital
|
11,958
|
8.8
|
0:22:42
|
|
22
|
Verizon Communications
|
11,756
|
8.6
|
0:16:13
|
|
23
|
Facebook
|
11,024
|
8.1
|
0:32:43
|
|
24
|
United Online
|
10,243
|
7.5
|
0:28:52
|
|
25
|
Hewlett-Packard Company
|
10,210
|
7.5
|
0:07:19
|
|
Source: Nielsen Online
|
|
Top 25 brands
Through Dec. 30 |
|
|
Parent
|
Unique Audience (000)
|
Reach %
|
Time spent per person (hh:mm:ss)
|
|
1 |
Google
|
75,303
|
55.1
|
0:21:19
|
|
2 |
Yahoo!
|
74,123
|
54.2
|
0:54:11
|
|
3 |
MSN/Windows Live
|
57,976
|
42.4
|
0:36:32
|
|
4 |
Microsoft
|
51,877
|
38.0
|
0:20:37
|
|
5 |
AOL Media Network
|
51,733
|
37.9
|
1:20:56
|
|
6 |
Fox Interactive Media
|
37,788
|
27.7
|
0:52:45
|
|
7 |
YouTube
|
31,009
|
22.7
|
0:23:30
|
