Embedded Philanthropy, URL Shorteners for Good, and Maximizing Meaning

by Nathaniel Whittemore · 2009-05-19 14:42:00 UTC
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With the rise of Twitter and other micro-messaging platforms, there is a booming industry around URL shorteners. These little tools like bit.ly, tinyurl.com, and is.gd take your long link and turn it into a fraction of the characters so as to more easily fit within the 140 character limit.

Today I ran across Good.ly, a URL shorten that donates a portion of the referral fees it receives from product purchases to charter. Basically it works like this. You see some awesome kicks on Zappos. You Tweet, "Omg totally buying these awesome 80%20's! http:good.ly/65fh5." One of your followers clicks on it, is brought to the Zappos page, and then buys the shoes. Assuming that Zappos has a referral program set up (which I actually don't know if they do?), Good.ly gets a small fee for "referring" the sale to them. Good.ly then donates %55 of this fee to one of a growing number of charities.

This is an example of what Peter Deitz and the folks at Social Actions might call "embedded philanthropy." The idea of embedded philanthropy is that different companies, like Good.ly, are embedding a philanthropic component into a huge array of our day-to-day commercial transactions. In some ways, it's like moving a piece of corporate social responsibility to the user side, and making it a part of the commercial relationship between the company and it's client (or user, for the case of online products).

I don't think that this sort of embedded philanthropy is going to in any way diminish more "traditional" forms of philanthropic action. I think it's power is that it reflects a growing desire I think we're experiencing to integrate our values with our commercial and career desicions. We're increasingly all about maximizing value and meaning - both the value and meaning we derive from the array of our experiences and the value and meaning we contribute to communities and causes we care about.

It seems to me that these embedded philanthropic tools are on the front part of that shifting curve, and seem to be a good place to experimenting with ideas and capital.

This blog post is part of the Embedded Philanthropy Blog Series, sponsored by Telecom for Charity. The blog series was launched in May 2009 to highlight expert thinking and encourage discussions on the state of embedded philanthropy in today's economy.

Nathaniel Whittemore is the founder of Assetmap. Previously he was the founding director of the Northwestern University Center for Global Engagement.
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