Money for Nothing

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.

"A lot of people doing a little can be better than a few people doing a lot," says Mr. Karim, now a 30-year-old graduate student at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. "That's stayed with me all my life."

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.

Getting More Creative

"There's a noticeable decline in the growth rate of charitable giving in recessionary years," says Gene Tempel, executive director of the Center on Philanthropy, part of Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis. "When people are insecure about the future or have fewer resources, they give less. You could see people trying to assist in more creative ways."

GoodSearch.com is another search engine that funds donations with advertising revenue; for every search performed on the site, roughly one cent goes to charity.

Other sites use different methods. CharityUSA.com owns several sites where users simply click on a button to make a contribution that's paid for by advertisers. Its Greater Good Network of Web sites started in 1999 with TheHungerSite.com, which lets people give food to impoverished communities. The site funnels advertising revenue to charities like Mercy Corps and America's Second Harvest. Its success inspired CharityUSA.com to create other sites dedicated to particular causes, including TheBreastCancerSite.com, which raises money to provide free mammograms.

Pennies Add Up

Each click on one of these sites generates a few pennies at best, but with more than five million unique monthly visitors to the Greater Good sites at last count, the pennies add up. Last year, these sites raised $1.5 million. "There is now this forum for people all around the world to take action together to support an issue, and small actions can really add up to do a lot of good," says Lisa Halstead, chief operating officer of the Greater Good Network.

Facebook users, meanwhile, are funding rainforest preservation in Costa Rica by building gardens on each other's profile home pages.

David King, a 30-year-old software engineer based in Menlo Park, Calif., developed an application called (Lil) Green Patch. When a Facebook user installs the application on his or her profile, a small garden appears on the profile's home page. That user can then send plants that will appear in the gardens of friends who also have installed (Lil) Green Patch on their profiles. (When plants are sent to someone who doesn't have a Green Patch, the recipient is invited to install the application.)

Anyone using the application sees ads, and an undisclosed portion of the revenue from those advertisers is donated to the Nature Conservancy, a land-conservation organization. Sending 10 plants raises enough money to save one square foot of rainforest in Costa Rica, through the organization's Adopt an Acre program. In the first quarter of this year, (Lil) Green Patch users funded more than $15,000 in donations, enough to save more than 13.6 million square feet of rainforest.

Youth Movement

With more than three million installations and nearly 350,000 active users, earlier this month (Lil) Green Patch was among the top 15 Facebook applications. Its donations pale in comparison to the $484 million contributed by individuals to the Nature Conservancy in 2007. But the Green Patch demographic -- 56% of its users are 22 to 25 years old -- is encouraging to Jonathon Colman, the Nature Conservancy's director of digital marketing.

"Our donors skew much older," Mr. Colman says. "It would be interesting to see what might happen with people who are 22 and 25 today when they're in their 30s and 40s and have greater wealth and more income. We feel that people using Green Patch today will be ready to become direct supporters tomorrow."

Mr. Tempel of the Center on Philanthropy says the fact that charitable clicking in general is popular predominantly among a younger demographic hints at the model's success over the long term. The use of social-networking sites to organize people for charitable campaigns "will continue to grow and develop, and at some point it will be a major factor of how organizations raise their funds," he says.

Miles Ahead

One question as the economy sputters is whether enough advertising revenue will continue to pour in for all these clicks, searches and social interactions to add up to meaningful checks. In 2001, for example, TheHungerSite.com shut down for five weeks when advertising dried up. Social-networking sites may be more resilient. Research firm eMarketer Inc. expects social-network advertising to grow 70% this year and 29% in 2009, despite a sluggish advertising market overall.

Should advertisers' interest in search engines, social-networking sites and charitable sites taper off, there are at least a couple of other ways to contribute to good causes without spending any money: donating airline miles, or using affiliation credit cards that donate a percentage of spending to charities.

Granted, you don't get a tax deduction for these kinds of contributions, says Mark Luscombe, principal analyst for the tax and accounting firm CCH Inc. But there is some payback, says Mr. Tempel. "You really feel good about it because it takes a decision to give away miles," he says. "It's like giving away some of your CDs or movies to a library."