About MiniGiving.Org
How it works
Online stores often run affiliate programs - they pay other websites a cut of their sales when someone comes to the store and makes a purchase from a link on that website. Thousands of websites pay their expenses by using such paid-for links. With minigiving.org, we're doing a twist on that model: we're donating 100% of all revenue from these clicks to charity, and asking you to make a small extra effort to click through to your favorite shopping sites from the minigiving.org website rather than going there directly.
Who is behind this?
The site is managed by Gerard Manning, a bioinformatics researcher in San Diego and long-term web developer, who developed his first website (ceolas.org, still running) in 1993, a month after the original Mosaic web browser came out. He has also been a long-term supporter of the International Rescue Committee, and came up with this idea as a way to support IRC and other charities that make a little money have a huge impact.
What's the catch?
There is no catch. All the expenses and resources to run this site are donated, so literally 100% of the fees we receive from web merchants go to the IRC. There are a number of other charity affiliate sites on the web, but most of them take a substantial cut of your donation in operating expenses, or are rather quiet about whether they do or not.
Does anyone else do this?
Yes, sites like iGive.com, Charitable Emporium, GreaterGood.Com and others are similar. Several other sites make charitable donations from affiliate programs. However, most of them either take a substantial portion of the proceeds for operating expenses, or are unclear on their websites as to how they are funded. By contrast, MiniGiving.Org is fully supported by volunteer donations, and is the only site we know of where 100% of all affiliate fees go to charity. Other sites typically have a wider range of supported charities. We will probably also support more as we get established, but want to focus on those, like IRC, where even a few dollars can make a huge difference to a homeless refugee. We are not going to be in the business of supporting symphonies, higher education or animal welfare: we've nothing against them, but want to put effort into where it has the most impact.
What's the current state of this project?
Minigiving.Org is fully functional. A very short test was done over Christmas 2006 among a handful of colleagues, and for Christmas of 2007, it's been expanded to a much larger group of friends and colleagues - if you're reading this, you probably either know Gerard or were told about the site by a friend. In early 2008 we expect to go public with the site, and are hoping that people will use the site a lot for Christmas shopping, so that we can strongly support IRC. For the public phase, nothing succeeds like success!
What do you think?
We'd love to hear any thoughts you have on this site and how we could improve or promite it. Please let us know if you have any comments.
-Gerard.