Other ways to raise funds for Kiva (clickin & searchin & more)

[Guest]

.

[Julia]

GoodSearch http://www.goodsearch.com/Default.aspx is a search engine that will donate 50% of its profit to the charity of your choice (kiva) when you use it.

Goodsearch uses the Yahoo search engine and you can load it into your firefox or IE browser (i.e. you can put it in the tool bar so its easy to use).

 

[Joe]

Interesting site. I typed in kiva.org in the "who do you goodsearch for?" section. Then hit the "amount raised" button and got the following stats:

January    887 searches   $8.87
February   481 searches   $4.81
March      520 searches   $5.20
Total: Year-to-Date   1888 searches   $18.88
Total: Since Inception   2426 searches   $24.26

Every penny helps.

[Phil]

Unfortunately this only appears to be accessible in the US. I'm based in Sydney, Australia, and when I try conduct a search it says:

"GoodSearch is currently only available from within the United States, though we plan to expand internationally in the near future."

Oh well...

[jaribilen]

I'm living outside the U.S too. 

You can rate kiva.org at allthingsweb2.com, hopefully it will bring in a few more new lenders.

http://www.allthingsweb2.com/mtree/FINANCE_2.0/Kiva.org/details/

[Julia]

Looks like our GoodSearch clicking worked, we doubled the money for KIVA in April

Month   Searches   Amount Raised (Estimated)
January     887             $8.87
February  481            $4.81
March       533             $5.33
April        1098      $10.98

I have it as a default on my firefox browser. I know I search a lot.

[Samantha]

that's awesome! I used that site a bunch of times and it's great to see REAL numbers that I probably helped. Lets triple it for May!

[FANAFI]

Idea... Start an affiliate program through Amazon.com or some other source (thousands out there) and commit to moving the profits of that effort into Kiva lending. We already had a business going and decided to move all the profits from it into Kiva (10% of all sales are our profits and we now pump it into Kiva, $175 last month). Doesn't take much to get started if you run your business via a free site such as a blog (Blogger, WordPress, LiveJournal, etc) and just get the word out. Even $100/month can make a huge difference at Kiva!

Meet people. Build a business. Change the World!

-Jeff & Heather

[Joe]

Good idea with affiliate programs. Here's an Amazon affiliate store I whipped up last night. It's live so feel free to buy something. When you checkout, it takes you over to amazon.com where you can login if you have an account or create a new one to complete your order.

http://shop.kivafriends.org

Amazon sends affiliate payments out every quarter I think (even though their signup page says monthly). Most book and DVD purchases can get affiliates anywhere up to a buck or two, depending on the price. Naturally the more expensive something is, the more of a cut affiliates get. I think I snagged about $10 for the cause with the DVD player I just bought to test the system out.

[FANAFI]

Bookmarked! Great work Joe!

-Jeff

[Joe]

Thanks Jeff

There's still some tweaking to be done with the categories, but it's live. If you purchase things at Amazon that you don't see listed on the affiliate site, let me know and I'll see what I can do to get it added.

I'll also be posting screen shots of the Amazon summaries that shows how much has been generated every month or so. Amazon pays every quarter, with the next one being at the end of July I think, so hopefully we'll get a nice chunk of change by then

[Julia]

Hi Joe,
 could you please send me the url to the amazon affiliate for Banker to the Poor: Micro-Lending and the Battle Against World Poverty. I am going to try to set it up in second life. I am having so much fun there.  I have a KIVA car and a KIVA plane.

thanks,
julia

[FANAFI]

Joe,

Hope you don't mind, but I created a fun little advertisement on our blog to direct people to your affiliate page...

What do you think?

Oh, if people want to add it to their blog or site, you have our permission.. Spread the joy!

Here is the image as it appears under Friends of LMYG.

[Joe]

I don't mind at all. That's great! I like how you worded it.  Thanks for making it available for others to use.

[Joe]

Current stats on Amazon. Thanks to everyone who has purchased something through the store or  affiliate link.

Again, the store is http://shop.kivafriends.org

If you'd prefer to shop on Amazon, then the link to get Kiva a small percentage of anything you purchase is http://www.amazon.com/?&tag=kivafrie-20

These are stats from the last few days. Click to enlarge.

[Laurie]

Fanafi, I would love to add your shopping graphic to my blog, but I am not quite blog savvy enough to do so without a bit a help.

I WAS able to add one of the Kiva "ads" to my blog, using the html language provided on the Kiva site.  I also was able to save your jpeg file of the logo, and to post it on my blog. 

The missing link: I don't know how to write the html that will take a reader of my blog to the target shopping site.  Do you have a little snippet of html that I can use?  The html language I got from the Kiva site both displayed and logo and redirected the user to the Kiva site, and I was able to dump it into a "widget" on my blog (how it works is a mystery to me).

Thanks for any help you can give!

-- Laurie