Donate money by searching the internet

Susan Jones, Class of 2002
Director of Faith-Based Service and Learning

Here's an easy way to raise money for your favorite cause by surfing the Internet. GoodSearch is a search engine that donates half of its advertising revenue to charity.

You probably know that most search engines like Google and Yahoo are free to us (and make money for themselves) because businesses pay them to put ads on the search engine site. The people at GoodSearch take a portion of the money that advertisers pay them and donate it to charity. GoodSearch is powered by Yahoo, so you get the same results as you would if you used the regular Yahoo search engine. You can even pick the organization that receives the donation for your search; the only limitation is that the charity has to be a legal non-profit that is registered with GoodSearch.

This month, I'm GoodSearching for the Worldwide Fistula Fund. Some other organizations that you might consider include: the African Well Fund, Invisible Children, the International Rescue Committee, the Alabama Environmental Council, the Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation, and the ONE Campaign. If you can't get excited about any of those, there are over 50,000 other choices charities, and more are being added every day.

The average donation is a little over $0.01 per search, which doesn't sound like a lot at first. But, it adds up. Let's say, for example, I decide I'm donating to the African Well Fund. Right now I probably search Google at least ten times a day on average. That's $36 a year that the African Well Fund wouldn't get otherwise. And if I can convince 33 other people to start GoodSearching for AWF, then we'd raise $1,200 in the next year. According to Africare (the AWF partner organization that actually digs wells), $1,200 builds a well in a village in Africa that doesn't have access to clean water. It adds up eventually. And it's easy. I'm not going out of my way to do anything except change my internet search page.


The more users GoodSearch has, the more web traffic the site generates. When more traffic is generated, more businesses are interested in advertisting on the site. This causes the price of advertising space to go up, which increases the site's revenue, which means that more charities will be getting more money. It's a good thing.