November 29, 2001 | Read Time: 3 minutes
AOL Time Warner, Cisco Systems, and Yahoo have joined together to start a new philanthropy Web site — and a nonprofit organization to run it. The site, Network for Good, incorporates the tools and resources of Helping.org, the online giving site that the AOL Time Warner Foundation has operated since October 1999.
The companies started to explore the idea of a joint site more than a year ago, says David Eisner, senior vice president of the AOL Time Warner Foundation. He says the companies realized that by working together they could avoid duplicating one another’s efforts and combine their marketing power to drive traffic to the site.
According to Mr. Eisner, the current economic downturn wasn’t a factor in the decision to join forces. The AOL Time Warner Foundation has committed $5-million to the project; the other companies declined to say how much cash they had provided. In two years of operation, Helping.org brought in $20-million in donations and matched 175,000 people with potential volunteer opportunities. Like Helping.org, the new site allows visitors to search for volunteer opportunities and to make online donations to more than 850,000 nonprofit organizations. Network for Good covers all transaction and credit-card fees associated with processing the donations.
One of the features offered by Network for Good that did not exist on Helping.org: a section that provides visitors with information on how to speak out in behalf of the causes they care about. The site allows users to search for contact information for the elected officials that represent them, as well as news organizations in their area.
The most significant difference between Network for Good and Helping.org, says Chris Sinton, president of the new organization, may be that Network for Good is organized as an independent nonprofit organization. The group’s bylaws state that more than half of all members of the board must be from outside the technology industry.
Mr. Sinton has been working on the Network for Good project for the past seven months. A Cisco employee for nine years, his experience includes overseeing Cisco’s corporate Web site and intranet and working for more than a year on NetAid, Cisco’s project with the United Nations Development Program to use the Internet to raise awareness of global poverty. While NetAid contributes information to the international section of the Network for Good Web site, NetAid will continue its work as an independent entity.
The next big project Network for Good plans to pursue is finding a way to link the myriad nonprofit databases — such as nonprofit directories, volunteer-recruitment sites, and donation sites — that are on the Internet.
To use those resources, nonprofit organizations often have to post the same information at many different sites, Mr. Sinton explains. The organization hopes to be able to work with the groups that run the different databases to create a form that charities can fill out once at Network for Good that can then be forwarded to all of the appropriate databases.
To get there: Go to http://www.networkforgood.com.
