Scott Hammond - Drums
Feed the starving for free
Take a click to www.thehungersite.com and amid a pile of banners you’ll see a yellow button in the middle of the site’s front page. The emblazoned message is ‘Help Feed the Hungry – Click here daily, it’s free!’ Do so and a cup of a staple foodstuff is bought for someone, somewhere who is hungry.
Who pays for it?
It may sound like a scam, but it’s not. The logic behind this site is brilliant. It’s a win-win-win situation for the starving, the internet user, and the sponsors: in practical terms they receive cost effective feel good public relations, especially powerful in helping promote ethical brands.
The hungersite is a
The food is distributed by Mercy Corps, a large
How much food is given?
In the year 2000 the Hunger site paid for over 9,500 tons of food to be distributed, enough to feed nearly 400,000 people daily. Sadly management issues and a drop in advertising rates meant the amount donated dropped, however the recovery has started and last year 2,800 tons was delivered, enough for over 100,000 people.
How it really works
The hungersite is a very clever idea. In effect it’s an advertising site where much of the profit is distributed to charity. In fact CharityUSA.com, the organisation behind the site these days, isn’t a charity; it's a profit-making company.
It makes its money by selling merchandise on the back of the site itself; though crucially all the charity click money goes to feed the starving. And as you don’t need to buy anything and the charities themselves confirm they get the cash, who cares?
The mechanics
Technically the hungersite’s sponsors don’t pay when you click the ‘feed the starving’ button; it’s more complex. They pay when you directly click through to them via the sponsor's page; at a rough rate of 20p per click.
The amount of food donated from clicking the button is thus a nominal figure derived from the estimated ‘click-through’ rate to a sponsor’s page; a standard internet advertising procedure, my estimate is it’saround 0.5p per ‘feed the starving’ button click.
Asa comparison for an ad on search engine Google, you’d pay 1p to £60 per click depending on how high up the ad list you want to be. Thus the ads on the Hungersite aren’t particularly expensive, plus they’re prominently placed and people like the association.
Also the demographics show a disproportionate number of affluent older women do most of the clicks, a usually difficult to reach advertising audience.
Is it worth it?
Taking time to click really helps, especially if you do it daily. The hungersite offers an e-mail daily prompt reminder service (signing up to it also gives an additional two cups of food).
The site then places a cookie on your computer (this means it then knows who you are whenever you go to the site) so you can see how many times you’ve managed to click in the current year. Though if you don’t want this, it can be disabled.
Are there any other sites doing this?
The hungersite has now been around six years and its parent company has set up a number of sister sites to help support breast cancer treatment, child health, literacy, the rainforests and animal rescue. These all help in a similar way.
Better still when you link through to one of these sites all of them are connected to each other. So you can run through clicking them all together if you chose.
