Inside the Marketers Studio - David Berkowitz's Marketing Blog

ChangingThePresent - Non-Sponsor of the Week

This blog doesn't take real sponsorships. Instead, one site that is making the web and world a better place will reside atop the blog free of charge. To nominate a site for future week's non-sponsor, contact me.

I checked out ChangingThePresent.org, and it's a great one for your del.icio.us tagroll. It also has gift ideas that the recipient will never want to return - though they might want to return the favor. This is from a recent email of theirs:

Every year, one hundred billion dollars is spent on holiday presents. That's "billion" with a "b" and 100 with a hundred. Imagine, for one delirious moment, what could be done this very year if all of it, or even some meaningful percentage, went to changing the world for the better. Imagine.

This notion isn't so farfetched. In fact, that is exactly the purpose
of ChangingThePresent.org.

ChangingThePresent.org has over a thousand donation gifts covering every cause you can think of. For very little money people can choose to buy books for children, save an acre of the rainforest, buy an hour of a cancer researcher's time or feed a hungry family. And you can make a donation gift in someone's name and send them a personalized card. You can choose from a library of photos, or upload your own.

This Week's Non-Sponsor: Shop.org's Cybermonday

This blog doesn't take real sponsorships. Instead, one site that is making the web and world a better place will reside atop the blog free of charge. To nominate a site for future week's non-sponsor, contact me. This week's non-sponsor was referred by Mike May.

One of interactive marketing's biggest challenges is hiring, and Shop.org offers a way to promote its members' contributions toward a worthwhile cause. Here's the summary from Shop.org Executive Director Scott Silverman:

Shop.org has launched www.cybermonday.com, an online shopping mall where nearly 400 merchants are showcasing their holiday promotions and sales.  It's an affiliate site and all of Shop.org's proceeds go to our Ray M. Greenly Scholarship Fund, which provides tuition assistance to college students interested in e-commerce careers. Through the site, Shop.org becomes an affiliate and we make affiliate commissions from any sale that originates from the site.

 

This Week's Non-Sponsor: Sunlight Labs

This blog doesn't take real sponsorships. Instead, one site that is making the web and world a better place will reside atop the blog free of charge. To nominate a site for another week's non-sponsor, contact me.

This week's non-sponsor is Sunlight Labs, which is designed "to improve government transparency and political influence disclosure." It's a timely pick for election week. To get a sense of what it does best, check the Earmark Map.

This Week's Non-Sponsor

In that this blog doesn't take real sponsorships, I figured I'd try an experiment where every week, one site that is making the web and world a better place will reside atop the blog free of charge. To nominate a site for another week's non-sponsor, contact me.

This week's non-sponsor is Kiva, the site for "loans that change lives." Kiva writes, "Kiva lets you lend to a specific entrepreneur in the developing world, empowering them to lift themselves out of poverty." You can try it out with just a $25 loan and then build your portfolio from there. For more on microloans, read the recent New Yorker article on the different philosophies of eBay founder Pierre Omidyar, Grameen Bank founder and now Nobel Peace Prize winner Muhammad Yunus, and others.