I can report magical progress on this front for the Internet generation. It turns out that nowadays there is indeed such a thing as a free lunch, and it can help feed the hungry of the world. If you want to glimpse the future of philanthropy, try clicking on thehungersite.com. The site, a year old this week and winner of a Webbie (the Oscars of cool Web sites), lets you donate a cup and a half of rice or grain a day just by clicking on a button that says donate free food. That’s it. No tiresome credit-card information to fill out. Easy for kids. You give the advertisers your eyeballs for a few seconds, and they give money to the United Nations World Food Program —for much less than it would cost the advertisers to get your attention otherwise. Call it charitable alchemy, but it works.
We’ll need these innovative “cause-related marketing” ideas to feed the hungry. A new study released last week shows charitable giving is at last on the rise in the United States, after a spell in the 1990s when contribution levels were virtually unchanged despite the riches of the bull market. Now more people are finally feeling fat: the giving totals are up an encouraging 9.1 percent, to $190 billion. But most of that money goes into local middle-class communities ($80 billion to churches alone), and donors still tend to favor bricks and mortar at their alma maters over needier causes where their names don’t go on plaques —like after-school programs for at-risk kids or hunger relief. (A National Hunger Summit this week in Washington will report 31 million Americans can’t pay their food bills.) The child-poverty rate —18 percent —is higher than 30 years ago. Donations to international organizations are up sharply, but still account for less than 2 percent of total giving.
That’s not going to cut it. Arguably the biggest story in the world right now is that an entire continent —Africa —is dying, the victim of AIDS, war and famine. While the spread of democracy in other regions has helped ease starvation worldwide (nations with a free press and accountable politicians avoid famine), the numbers are still grim. According to the United Nations, about 800 million people around the world suffer from malnutrition, and 24,000 die of hunger every day. That’s one person dying on average every 3.6 seconds, 75 percent of them under the age of 5. This statistic is dramatized on thehungersite.com by a map of the world where poverty-stricken countries darken at that interval, signifying a death. “Someone just died in Africa!” my kids will shout. “Someone just died in China!”
But having just clicked to donate food, the kids feel more empowered to do a little something about it. So far, 65 million visitors from 182 countries have clicked in 17 million pounds of food, and the big advertisers are not even in yet. (That dwarfs the visits to the United Nations’ own Web sites.) Only 10 percent of the money sent by advertisers goes for United Nations overhead, a respectable figure. To keep visitors from clicking over and over, you can only donate free once a day. The same principle applies to therainforestsite.com, where each click results in the Nature Conservancy setting aside 13.5 square feet of rain forest.
There’s enough hype in all of this to go around. Buzzwords like “social entrepreneurship” and “viral marketing” (sending a site to your whole address book) haven’t changed the world yet. But it’s hard to avoid getting a little excited about where do-goodism is headed. “This probably is the wave of the future for charity,” says Abby Spring of the United Nations World Food Program. “We’ll look back at thehungersite.com and think it was an antique.” Until then, why not click away a little guilt once a day? It beats eating Mom’s peas.
