June 28, 2007 | Read Time: 1 minute
The world’s largest professional networking site, LinkedIn, will soon allow its 11 million users to add “badges” to their profiles that link to their favorite philanthropic causes.
LinkedIn already offers members — who use the site to connect with other professionals — the option of adding badges, or small banners, with the names of alumni associations and other societies.
Its new LinkedIn for Good project extends that idea to charities, since “supporting philanthropic causes is definitely part of one’s professional identity,” says David A. Sanford, a product and business analyst at LinkedIn.
When people click the banners, they are taken to the charities’ Web pages, where they can make donations.
LinkedIn extracts no fees for the service. It has also announced plans to offer each charity a static home page on the site and to offer nonprofit groups free job listings, which normally cost $145.
So far, LinkedIn users are limited to supporting five groups — the American Red Cross, the World Wildlife Fund, Unitus, Kiva, and Doctors Without Borders. Doctors Without Borders, partly due to the endorsement of the British musician James Blunt, raised $23,000 in a few months of testing on the site.
Mr. Sanford says LinkedIn selected those five because they already had a strong presence on the site, but says he and his colleagues hope to add more groups over the summer.
Eventually, he says, charities will be able to create their own LinkedIn pages and banners themselves.
For more information: Go to http://www.linkedin.com/good. Nonprofit groups can write to nonprofits@linkedin.com to participate.
