Click to Give

In the last month I got two emails reminding me about Clicking to Give sites on the web - you mouse click an advertisement box and it translates into donations for a good cause. I was going to compile a bookmark folder of the sites (and find more) and just try to run through it each morning and habituate myself to doing a good deed before I've even had coffee. That way, I'm done good deeding for the day and can proceed to be an asshole until bedtime.

Anyway, the sites are all with the same meta-site, GreaterGood.com, so I don't need a bookmark folder, and this is what I wanted to share with you all. Go to the site for Free Mammograms, or the site for Food For Rescue Animals and then run through the tabs at the top of the page, because all the sites are accessible through eachother. Make a click for the Rainforest or Literacy or World Hunger. And don't forget Child Health! It's easy to do, quick click. And you can click every day, but not more than once a day.

If you are a cynical, suspicious person like me, you can even check out the legitimacy of this fund raising on Snopes at this webpage on the Free Mammograms and you can see that it takes 45,000 clicks to provide one woman with a free mammogram. So get clicking. Also, at any of the fundraising sites, they have a RESULTS link on the left that tells you what the clicks have earned by day, month, or year. For example, on May 6, the clicks generated 19K pounds of food for Hunger programs.

And if you are an even more cynical, suspicious person than me, and you like to be an asshole well beyond bedtime, you can do the research one step further and find out if the companies that are paying to advertise, and therefore having 75% of their fees donated through a secondary LLC, the GreaterGood site, get a tax break for this and would be donating an equal or greater amount to charity if the site didn't exist. Maybe they are laundering their donations through advertisement, double dipping the same amount of dollars that would be used to get IRS deductions anyhow. I don't know, I'm writing a novel, not an investigative piece on the faux philanthropy.