Searching for a Cause

Last week, I received an email from someone I volunteer with at a local non-profit. Turns out our charity has been registered with a new free-search engine called GoodSearch. Powered by Yahoo, GoodSearch donates an average of $.01 to the charity of your choice for every search you make.

You can either associate your search with your charity --- there is minimal setup that goes into it if you are the first to register a particular nonprofit --- or you can choose the “Charity of the day” in the upper-left corner of the site.

After learning about this new concept, I have a few observations: first – another great Web 2.0 idea!; second – how can I get more people to use it?; and third – what a simple, engaging way to apply the principles of cause marketing. (See also Motorola’s (Product) Red campaign.)

We’ll use this blog as an example. I’m giving props to GoodSearch and linking you to the site: http://www.goodsearch.com/. By promoting GoodSearch on our blog, we create an actual, measurable result for the cause—while showing our compassionate side as corporate bloggers. With sensitivity to everyone’s differing opinions and beliefs, it’s a no-cost, non-partisan move that gets us out of the muck about “what we support” but answers a confident yes to the question of “whether we support charitable causes.” It’s clearly a cause marketing win-win scenario.

So click through to GoodSearch, find a charity you support, do a search to learn more about your cause and share it with friends. Better yet, if you really love GoodSearch, make our blog your home page and then click to GoodSearch.