By Teresa A. Martin
How do you merge business and good works? How do you do good by doing well? These are questions that a subset of entrepreneurs have debated and explored for years.
Last week a CCTC member pointed me to one more example of this exploration, a company called GoodSearch, http://www.goodsearch.com.
This is an interesting concept. It is basically an advertising model that uses the Yahoo search engine to provide a service that hopes to do both good and well.
It's a form of viral marketing - your non-profit promotes GoodSearch. Users use it. Ad dollars are generated. And a portion of those dollars is returned to the registered nonprofit of your choice.
The company benefits from more traffic and the nonprofit benefits by receiving about half of the generated advertising dollars.
It's a clever concept. We all use search. Many of us use it not only daily but multiple times a day. There's a reason Goggle is recording billions in revenue! Why not redirect some of those search-generated dollars?
That is exactly the question that was posed by the brother-sister team who founded the LA-based company. Their goal was to create a company which would make supporting charitable organizations an effortless, cost-free daily activity. Both siblings had worked in Internet startups. Both had a passion for philanthropy. GoodSearch was a way to merge the two interests.
Any nonprofit can register with GoodSearch. The company claims that some 35,000 nonprofits across the country have registered. Here in our region, the National Marine Life Center, the Association to Preserve Cape Cod, the Cape Cod College Educational Foundation, the Cape Cod Pilgrim Memorial Association, and the Cape Cod Regional Technical High School are all registered nonprofits. After poking around a bit, I think that Jr. Tech/CCTC will soon be one too!
Of course, you need an awful lot of searches to raise any real funds. Although fifty percent sounds good, the reality is that the nonprofit realizes about a penny per search. In order to make this work - for both the company's bottom line and for the your nonprofit of choice - you need to generate a whole bunch of searches. Hundreds and hundreds of searches. Thousands and thousands of searches.
That's where the viral marketing element kicks in. GoodSearch hopes that your nonprofit will do the outreach and encourage people to make GoodSearch their default browser search, to put it in their browers' toolbar, to make it their habit.
The company wins. Your nonprofit wins. Well, at least that is the idea.
A penny doesn't sound like that much, but I remember people who took very nice vacations from the change they collected in the bottle next to their door. Pennies add up. And for many small nonprofits, an extra $700 or $7000 makes an awful lot of difference.
Is there something in it for the company? Well, of course there is! There's free marketing and a good PR story to tell. But there's something interesting to explore for nonprofits too.
Maybe it is possible to do good and do well. This is one more experiment in that area. The company is about 18 months old, so the jury is still out. It's an interesting model, and one well worth trying.
Become a Member
