Facilitating Philanthropy Online
By Molly E. Holzschlag
Companies like Amazon, eBay, and Wells Fargo all responded quickly to the September 11 tragedies, making announcements and setting up tools on their Web sites that helped users make direct donations to the Red Cross. This is community at its most powerful, and people at their best. This sort of altruism serves as an extremely powerful example that our work on the Web can translate into real-world action and can also provides site users with a sense of pride and stability. What's more, using the Web to collect donations and provide support during this disaster embraces and expands upon the Net's early ideologies: To serve as a communications platform in a time of severe crisis.
Philanthropic and civic activities online help enrich life offline, and designers have the power to facilitate both. By examining the ways in which philanthropy manifests itself on the Web via sites and tools, designers and developers can show clients how to have a positive effect on the local, national, and global communities while simultaneously gaining a positive public image.
The Web performed exceptionally during the recent tragedy, because Web developers and designers worked with their companies and clients as well as independently to foster support, diseminate information, and offer encouragement. The savvy developer or designer should keep this momentum by showing his or her client, organization, company, or independent Web site that promoting philanthropic activities is a winning situation all around.
Corporate Philanthropy
Whether you're working on a behemoth of a corporate site, or one that's more modest, you can offer visitors philanthropic information, events, and even tools that will extend back to the real world.
