Over 2,500 Top Web Retailers Band Together to Support Shoppers' Favorite Charities
Donate to charity while you shop? Sounds too easy. But this year, the online shopping mall, GoodShop.com is partnering with more than 2,500 retailers to allow online holiday shoppers to donate up to 30 percent of every purchase they make to the charity of their choice.
Because of GoodShop’s affiliation with online retailers like Amazon, Target, Staples, eBay, Best Buy and Apple, consumers can go to GoodShop’s website to purchase brand names.
And for every search conducted on their Yahoo powered sister site GoodSearch.com, approximately one penny is donated to shoppers’ favorite charities. The site can be used like any other search engine, but with GoodSearch, the pennies add up quickly. Just 500 people searching four times a day will earn approximately $7,300 a year.
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Co-founder JJ Ramberg told The Christian Post their site is different because you are “never making a donation yourself. You aren’t paying anything extra.” So since people are going to be Christmas shopping anyway, now part of their purchase can be put toward a charity.
Shoppers can also support hundreds of churches, ministries and Christian organizations that have signed up to participate with GoodShop.com.
There are three ways to make your money count on the site. You can shop directly on GoodShop.com, or let your pennies add up through searches on GoodSearch.com.
The third option is to sign up for their GoodDining membership. Each time you dine at their more than 10,000 participating restaurants, a percentage of what you spend goes to your charity.
More than 103,000 nonprofits and schools are now on board with GoodShop, including Unicef and The American Red Cross. Shoppers have raised over $43,000 to help animals in need with ASPCA, St. Jude Children's Research Hospital earned more than $15,000, and a single purchase at Gaiam resulted in a $284 donation to the Motion Mania Dance Theater in Maryland.
If shoppers don’t see the charity they want to support listed on the site, they can register it. This includes schools, hospitals and clinics, volunteer services, political organizations, fraternal organizations, professional associations and religious organizations. Members can also track earnings on their profile as they make purchases and surf the Web.
The idea for a Web browser that helps you give back began with Ken Ramberg, founder of JOBTRAK, now a division of Monster.com, and MSNBC anchor JJ Ramberg. They figured in a bad economy, people don’t have a lot of money or time to volunteer, but they probably do a lot of Web searching.
In 2005, after realizing what a fraction of the $8 billion generated annually by search engine advertisers could do if it were directed toward organizations trying to make the world a better place, they launched GoodSearch.
GoodSearch, GoodShop and GoodDining have all spread via word-of-mouth, the blogger community, and a number of celebrities and their foundations including Jessica Biel, Montel Williams, Jeff Bridges, Faith Hill and Tim McGraw.
Scott Garell, CEO of GoodSearch, said in a statement, “By holiday shopping at GoodShop, we can help fill that gap by providing a simple and easy way for consumers to donate to their favorite cause while saving money with our coupons. The end result is more books for schools, research for cures, pets adopted, oceans cleaned and other important work accomplished by these non-profits.”
To date, GoodSearch has donated more than $8 million to over 103,000 charities and schools designated by its users.
