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Wednesday, March 18, 2009

Gizmo's - Best Free Volunteer, Charity, and Donation Technology | Gizmo's Freeware

Best Free Volunteer, Charity, and Donation Technology

Mon, 03/16/2009 - 02:41 — Rizar

Introduction: Best Free Volunteer, Charity, and Donation Technology to Help Other People

There are many free ways to volunteer, give to charity, and use the Internet to help other people. One of my favorite places to investigate charities is at the Charity Navigator. You can find charitable organizations to help you donate cars, support the troops, find charity events, or feed the hungry. Some charity or donation technology uses advertisements to raise revenue for their causes. But many freeware programs or online places bring people together to volunteer for an important cause or something they like to do anyways. You can volunteer your time, energy, or expertise and have fun in the process! One of my favorite free programs for volunteer helping is BOINC. It helps turn PCs into engines for scientific projects that seek to advance our knowledge, cure disease, or find other intelligent beings across the universe! And they can't do their work without volunteers.

You can also help charity for free! An interesting option is free sites like FreeRice, Charitii, DonateBot, The Hunger Site, and the Small Things Challenge that help to fight starvation and support many other causes, and all you have to do is play a game or click everyday or leave a website/application open. They give to selected charities based on the amount of fees they get from advertisers or organizations.

A flexible option is the GoodSearch toolbar or its search box that aptly replaces your current search engine (Google, Yahoo!, etc.). You pick your favorite charity or organization, use the search engine like normal, and watch GoodSearch divert some of its fees from advertisers to your charity. All for doing what you would normally do anyways.

But other places provide massive databases for volunteer opportunities, volunteer ideas, and virtual volunteering or charity opportunities: Idealist.org, VolunteerMatch, USA Freedom Corps, and Network for Good.

Feel free to help me by adding to this list. Consider writing a comment below about your favorite places online for free charity, volunteer helping, volunteer opportunities, charity events, etc.

I checked all websites with WOT and LinkScanner Lite. Some people left comments on WOT wondering how you can be certain that free online charity sites actually make the donations they say they do; I'm not entirely sure how to discover this, but it's a good guess that the information is available to the public since the websites name the charities to which they donate.

FreeRice, for example, is actually mentioned right on the website of its charity of choice. And popular charities named on GoodSearch would be fairly angry if they never received a check. If in doubt, contact the named charities and ask.