New Click-to-Donate ("CTD") Site. I noticed just today that The Literacy Site has joined the CTD family begun by TheHungerSite.com.
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The CTD phenomenon began in June 1999, when an individual man in the state of Indiana, United States, came up with an ingenious way to promote charitable giving to alleviate world hunger / starvation / malnutrition — whatever you want to call it — and the consequences of chronic undernourishment. He created a website at which interested people can click on a button to donate a small amount of staple food (then from the United Nations Food Program, now from Mercy Corps and America's Second Harvest). That click takes them to a screen on which appear small banner ads paid for by various enterprises to get their name before the public, establish their reputation as caring corporations, and bring some business their way if visitors to The Hunger Site who are interested in their work or products simply click their own banner.
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The Internet visitor does not him/herself need to give any money. The site advertisers make the actual contribution, one donation of a fixed size per click. Each visitor can give only once a day, because a cookie is set to prevent a given IP address from clicking more than once in 24 hours. So an advertiser knows that each click represents a unique visitor that day.
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The Hunger Site proved an immediate success. Its history section says: "To date more that 200 million visitors have given more than 300 million cups of staple food." In August 2001, the originator of the site (who is, curiously, not now named in the site's history; perhaps he modestly wants his work, not his name, to be known) sold The Hunger Site to two other individual American activists. Over time they have added other CTD sites to The Hunger Site: The Rainforest Site (preserves rainforest), The Breast Cancer Site (funds mammograms for poor women), The Child Health Site (provides rehydration fluids, prosthetics, and other medical care to children), The Animal Rescue Site (provides food for animals in American shelters), and, new, The Literacy Site (buys books for poor kids).
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I have made TheHungerSite.com one of the Favorites / Bookmarks on my browser, and try to click every day. All of the related CTD sites are accessible as tabs across the top of the screen at The Hunger Site (and each related site), so if you visit one, you can quickly visit as many of the others as you might like to support. It's a small thing, but a nice way to start your day: TheHungerSite.com.
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 3:31 PM