January 29, 1998 | Read Time: 3 minutes
A new World-Wide Web site is hoping to channel advertising dollars into charities’ bank accounts.
Eyegive, an Evanston, Ill., technology company, pays selected non-profit groups every time a person calls up one of the advertisements on its site (http://www.eyegive.com).
People who sign up for the service are asked to select a charity and to set their computers so that the company’s site automatically appears every time they start the software they use to view World-Wide Web sites. Eyegive’s site shows a page of advertisements for companies such as Spiegel, the cataogue company, or Barnes & Noble, the bookseller.
Then, whenever the Eyegive user calls up an advertisement, a fee that ranges from 6 to 12 cents is collected for the non-profit group selected by the user. Any organization that has received tax-exempt status from the Internal Revenue Service can benefit from Eyegive.
Each page is customized for the computer user. For instance, if a person chooses the American Cancer Society as the non-profit group he or she wishes to support, the top of the page will read, “Your donation to the American Cancer Society counts when you click anywhere on this page.” A check is then mailed to the designated non-profit group at the end of each month — as long as more than $25 has been raised.
Eyegive says that 4,500 people have signed up so far and that they have generated almost $8,000 in donations for non-profit groups. No more than five visits per computer user each day can go toward charity.
“We constitute a new source of funds for non-profits that never existed before,” says Robert N. Grosshandler, founder of the company.
Some charities are already mobilizing their constituents to use the Eyegive site to raise money. Small, grassroots groups have been particularly effective in recruiting people to sign up for the service, Mr. Grosshandler says.
For instance, three different charities dedicated to the protection of ferrets — the Ferret Association of Connecticut in Hartford, the Ferret Boarding House in Houston, and Ferret Family Services in Manhattan, Kan. — have used e-mail and printed newsletters to encourage their constituents to sign up for Eyegive. As of last week, the 48 people raising funds for those groups had brought in more than $250 collectively.
Tory Lynn Eckart, founder of Ferret Family Services, says that the money received from Eyegive allowed her group, which is run exclusively by volunteers and has an annual budget of less than $5,000, to pay for surgery on one ferret.
At present, Eyegive is paying charities out of its own pocket, and most advertising space on the Eyegive site is free. But Mr. Grosshandler is confident that once businesses become familiar with the service, selling advertisements will not be a problem.
He notes that because members fill out a questionnaire citing their interests — and the information is passed on to advertisers — marketers have an opportunity to figure out exactly what will appeal to users of the site. Mr. Grosshandler said he expects Eyegive to be turning a profit within a couple of months. At that point, half of the money that advertisers pay will go to charity, he says.
“The reason we have such good results is because of the whole context of doing good,” Mr. Grosshandler says. “Inherent in the structure we’ve created is this glow, this halo effect.”
