Seattle,WA 4/20/2010 3:05:00 PM
Can A Business Really Afford To Give To Charity? Or Can It Afford Not To?
Think the economy is tough? Try being a charity!
For small business keeping the doors open in a tight economy is an all consuming struggle. As tough as it is for business, it’s harder on the charity.
It really is understandable. If a business is just scraping by the discretionary donation dollar is bound to shrink.
But let’s take a minute to reason this out. Can we really afford to lose a worthy cause? Do we really want to find out that the local children's hospital has to layoff staff?
Here’s a bit of good news, there is a new service available to the nonprofit industry. No, this isn’t a sales pitch. The service is Free to the charity. Bought and paid for, just offered for free simply to raise much needed funds for worthy causes.
- No hidden costs.
- No tricks.
- No hidden agenda.
- No percentages, set up fees.
This is a dedicated online auction service built specifically to serve the nonprofit industry. Every penny that comes in goes directly to the charity. All of it.
Why?
Two reasons:
- To bring in money for charity.
- To help promote online business.
MarketingOnce shoppers stopped going to their yellow pages to find what they wanted, marketing to a dramatic shift. The world of shopping opened up with internet marketing. For people not geographically close to the “Mega Mall”, the internet was an absolute god send.
Not so much for small business.
“If you build it, they will come.”
Well, not if nobody sees it. Just having a website never did anything until a potential customer could find it. With shoppers using search engines like Yahoo, Google and now Bing to find what they want, every business that wants to stay open has to show up in search results. And Not just show up, but rank well enough in the results that customers can find them.
Two choices:
- Pay for the paid advertising slots on the search engine.
- Show up at the top of the natural search results.
Paid search is good if a business has way too much money and needs to get rid of it before tax time.
Natural search results are the real answers the search engine comes up with as relevant to a search query. Business doesn’t have to pay to show up for these, they just have to be the answer that the search engine trusts is the best.
Every search engine uses a complex computer program to determine what a website is about, and what search query it might be a relevant answer to. Then it ranks that website against the other websites for that particular query (vertical).
As the yellow pages go the way of the Dodo, a new industry has taken it’s place, Search Engine Marketing.
The Search Engine ranking factors, called an algorithm (complex math equation) are carefully guarded secrets. However some things are going to be consistent.
- Search Engines Don’t see Pictures like humans do.
- Text and context are what matters.
- How Websites connect to each other. (links)
What Does Any Of This Have To Do With Charity?
Links. Connections. How a business website is connected and what websites connect to it. In the world of Search Engines, certain websites are deemed a little more trustworthy than others. School websites, and charity websites fall into that kind of category. Search Engines know that this type of site doesn’t sell links or exchange links for self promotion like a typical business website. So a link from a website like these will carry more trust.
But very few businesses can give enough to charity to garner a dedicated link. (Bill Gates comes to mind. But he’s probably not reading this.)
Enter the Free Charity Auction Service.
Every Online Business that donates a product or service through this service gets a dedicated “Thank You” page that links to their website once the item is sold. That thank you page is tied back to the charity. A permanent bond between charity and business, acknowledging that philanthropic gift.
More donations to more worthy causes equal more connections to more trusted charity websites.
In an extremely competitive search vertical, the website with the most high value connections from Highly trusted websites is going to be more trusted as the best answer in search results. Higher placement in search results, equals more search traffic. More search traffic equals more prospective customers to the business website. More customers equal more business. More business equals more money that can be donated to worthy causes.
Connections that any business would be happy to get but few can afford, now can be had for a simple donation of a product or service.
Can any business really afford not to give?
