Doing Good, Lazily

Fundraising for good causes is one of my not-so-secret passions—a "side job" I do because I think anyone who can help others should. Although I hate cold-calling people for business reasons, I am perfectly happy to heckle my friends, relatives and even perfect strangers into giving a few bucks to the Heifer Foundation, the Leukemia Society, The Hunger Site, UNICEF, Kiva.org, 826 Valencia, or whatever my preferred charity of the moment might be. The theme is almost always "children": poor children, children with cancer, children who need food, children who live in places ravaged by natural disaster, etc. Well, today I discovered a new worthy cause, and an interesting vehicle for giving.

(See my strategy? I rope you in making you think you're gonna read about Swedish hotties, and then I feed you do-gooder stuff.)

Today at work, I was interviewing a high-level executive in one of Bonnier's book divisions, and he told me about the imminent release of J.K. Rowling's new book, The Tales of Beedle the Bard. The interesting thing about this book (apart from the fact that it stems from a very meta book-within-book story in the seventh edition of Harry Potter), is that Rowling has pledged to give 100% of the royalties of this book to her charity for children in Eastern European orphanages. Beedle the Bard launches worldwide on December 4th, and you're likely to hear more about this charity in the media shitstorm that will inevitably follow, which is a good thing. But you can say you saw it here first.

Rowling's charity is called the Children's High Level Group (lousy name, I know), and the purpose is to improve living conditions for the thousands of children who are institutionalized in Eastern Europe because their parents are too poor to care for them, or they're orphaned, or disabled, or disowned because they're descendants of the wrong ethnic minority. The places where these kids live, often from infancy, are terribly understaffed and underfunded, and many of the children develop serious mental issues (often leading to drug dependency, victimization in the human trafficking industry and suicide) because they don't have regular exposure to human touch. And on top of all that, they're typically subject to bullying and violence from other children scrabbling for scarce resources.

J.K. Rowling cofounded the Children's High Level Group (that's her in the photo with the baby, above) with the goal of lobbying for EU regulations and funding for these institutions, as well as directly providing material resources, education programs and emotional support for the kids.

I did a little research about the charity as background for the story I'm writing, and I found that one of the ways you can support CHLG is through a cool click-donating search engine called Everyclick. I'm a big fan of the clicks-for-charity fundraising system. It's so smart, and everybody wins. Basically, the idea is that a site sells ads—usually the charity site itself, plus maybe your own blog, Facebook profile, etc—but instead of taking the advertising revenue as profit, the organization gives it to a good cause.

Depending upon the size of the site, this can amount to millions of dollars of charity money, paid for by advertisers who would have been shelling out anyway. As a Web user, all you have to do is click. Since advertising prices are dependent upon traffic (the pay-per-click model), you are effectively the link that brings the money from the advertiser and puts it in the charity's pocket.

So, Everyclick took the concept a bit further by creating a whole search engine with targeted ads for funding charities. To use it, you sign up and replace your normal search engine with the Everyclick engine (I'm using Firefox as my browser, so I just switched the search toolbar to run on Everyclick—and I can easily toggle back to Google any time). Every time you use the search engine, your clicks generate a few pennies for the charity of your choice. Great idea, huh!

There are just two tiny incoveniences involved: 1) All the charities are UK-based, because Everyclick is a UK site, and the currency appears in pounds. No biggie, though. 2) I started using it today and I feel nice and helpful, but the user interface isn't as slick as I'm used to. It seems to be finding what I need, but for hardcore research I'm afraid I'm going to have to keep relying on our friends in Mountain View. Anyway, if you feel like doing something good today, with very little effort, check out Everyclick.