After my grandmother was recently diagnosed with breast cancer, my mom encouraged me to check out www.thebreastcancersite.com, which allows visitors to the site the opportunity to “click to give free mammograms.” I started to visit the site daily, and soon discovered that the site offered a number of other causes to “click” for. Soon, I was clicking to give food, child health care, books, and more.

Curious as to how this could be possible, I looked into the way this worked. What I found was that several websites are using the money generated by advertisements to help out different causes. How cool is that? I find it to be a breath of fresh air, and it helps me to have faith that not every agency out there is looking for a profit. Thanks to these “click-to-donate” sites, even the busy, broke, college student is capable of contributing to foundations that benefit issues like the rain forest, animal rescue, global warming, and violence, in addition to the causes I mentioned earlier.

If you have a few extra minutes to click around, why not make them count? In addition to www.thebreastcancersite.com, you can try www.care2.com, www.ripple.org, and www.freerice.com, which is a vocabulary game site that rewards your correct answers with free rice for the hungry. It’s an easy way to give, and it’s also considerably more rewarding than Facebook.

Megan Fitzgerald