Save the World With Firefox: Charity Extensions
Long ago a project was born called SETI@home. The idea was to donate your unused CPU cycles to help calculate things that were too big for a handful of supercomputers. It was funny & cool, helping search for extra-terrestrial life. Then the project became generalized into BOINC, enabling the development of all sorts of very important and serious volunteer distributed computing projects. Things like AIDS and cancer research, quantum computing, and my personal favorite: World Community Grid, which computes data useful for "Humanitarian research on disease, natural disasters and hunger." The BOINC project paved the path to a revolution called micro-volunteerism (or micro-computing), where a lot of people doing a little is better than a few people doing a lot. This idea was further explored in mini-game or daily-action sites, such as thehungersite FreeRice, and Care2.
Recently, micro-volunteerism has found a charitable footing as browser extensions which don't require any action on your part. With a handful of Firefox extensions (most are cross-browser compatible), you can donate a bit of unused browser real estate (such as blank new tabs, extra Google sponsored results, etc) to advertisements whose revenue goes to charities of your choosing. The idea is that $3/month generated by ad-views of the masses goes farther than $30/month donated directly by the much-fewer philanthropists out there.
You can find these extensions by searching Firefox Extensions for "charity". Here are the highlights:
Searching
These are engines that use either Yahoo or Google as their backend (so you see no difference in your search results), but which add some advertisements on the search's website or as extra sponsored results. Additionally, you can set these pages as your homepage and generate a few cents every time you open Firefox.
Here's a breakdown of my personal favorites. For some more information and ratings, check out these two articles Squidoo's & Gavin Hudson's articles.
| Website | Search engine | Ads on search page | Ads on search results | Firefox search bar exension |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Yes | Yes | Yes | ||
| Yes | Yes | Yes | ||
| No | No | No | ||
| Yes | Yes | Yes | ||
| Yes | Yes | No | ||
| Both | Yes | Yes | (not avail. for FF 3.6) | |
| Yahoo | Yes | Yes | Toolbar extension | |
| No | * | * |
Unfortunately, most of these plugins site between you and the search engine, so you lose a few search engine goodies (like Google's personalizesd results, autocomplete, etc). The exception is SearchAndShare, which is a Firefox plugin that hooks into your search pages rather than replacing them. And instead of showing more ads, the search queries you perform are data sold to companies which return more relevant ads. As a result, SearchAndShare is much less intrusive than the others.
Shop
A lot of commercial sites or blogs are considered "affiliate partners", and have links out to online shops (Amazon, BestBuy, etc). When someone clicks that link & purchases a product, the affiliate partner gets a percentage. Well there are a few websites (also offered as Firefox extensions) that do the same, but percentage profit goes to charity. The next time you want to purchase a product online, find it the normal way (Amazon search or what have you), then go to NeoAid, GoodShop, or BetterTheWorld to guide you back to that product for purchase.
Other
I've saved the best for last. These two projects are a bit miscellanious, so I'll just dive in.
DoGooder. For most users, this is the easiest win. The DoGooder extension is the least intrusive of all (but probably not as effective as some of the others). It replaces ads you'd normally see with more "socially responsible" ads, and then 50% of that revenue goes to charity. Maybe not the biggest money-maker for donations, but it's the only one that's 100% transparent to you.
Better The World Fundraising Sidebar. My personal favorite. The BTW sidebar takes a chunk of Firefox real estate to present ads, no matter where you are. This extension might be a lot to stomach for many people, but if you have the real estate (on very wide screens, or for casual browsing), this extension is probably the most effective money-maker of the lot because it covers the most end-user usage for ad-displays.
Additionally, BTW has a shopping extension (complete) and a search extension (on the horizon). They donate 90% of their proceeds (unlike many of the 50% shops above), and they're making huge strides in this social-entrepreneurship space. Keep your eye on these guys, I have a hunch they'll be the dominating this space as a one-stop-shop.
My setup
- Search: SearchAndShare.
- Homepage: SearchKindly is my homepage. It's the ugliest of all those search sites, but that's because it has the most ads, and I'd like to think that means it generates the best revenue. Plus they donate 100% proceeds. I've also installed a FF extension called New Tab Homepage, which opens your homepage any time you open a new tab. Those tabs are going to be blank otherwise, so why not?
- DoGooder: Installed. Shoe-in, this is the easiest and least-intrusive win.
- BTW Sidebar: I have it installed, but I hide it any time I'm doing intensive web-dev and firebug stuff. There's a quickie-button to toggle the bar.
If you know of any other extensions out there to help save world, please chime in!
