AFI BLOG: Media and Technology

The Wall Street Journal

Web sites let you donate to charity just by doing searches or clicking on ad banners. And it doesn’t cost you anything.

Growing up in the Chicago suburbs, Syed Karim learned early on that with charitable giving, even pennies could make a difference.

With his mother’s encouragement, he and his sister got into the habit of saving a fraction of their allowance to donate to an orphanage in their home country, Bangladesh. The change usually added up to less than $100 a year, but when pooled with donations from friends, family and neighbors, it helped build housing for orphans and fund scholarships to a university in Bangladesh.

Now, Mr. Karim and a friend, Ramadev Hukkeri, have taken that idea a step further, with a search engine called SearchKindly.org.

SearchKindly allows users to raise money for charity without even contributing their small change, simply by performing Google searches on the site. Advertisers on the site pay SearchKindly according to the number of users, and all advertising revenue goes to charity. Since its inception in February of last year, SearchKindly has donated a total of more than $10,000 to various organizations.

SearchKindly is one of several sites that allow users to help fund charities without spending any money. The amount they raise is a tiny fraction of the charitable contributions made in the U.S. every year. But with the sagging economy weighing on consumers’ wallets, this type of giving might become more popular than ever.

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