Tags: click-to-donate, development, philanthropy 2.0, social change, Web-native projects for social change, world food programme, Add more tags...,

or Close

Every click counts: this is what they surely think at FreeRice. This project, run be the United Nations' World Food Programme and supported by Harvard's Berkman Centre, could be labelled "click to donate".

The term is by now fairly widely used: the changemakers network Care2 dedicates an entire section to it, named in fact Click2Donate: several websites, search engines and, increasingly, Facebook applications, populate the Web of "clicking for good".

I am not trying to make the case here for the disappearance of any form of activism and collective action in light of a sort of easy-to-click, automated philanthropy. Rather, I am only painting the picture of a sophisticated and at the same time sustainable use of the fundamental element of human-Web interaction as we know it, the click. 

 

 

 

FreeRice is one of the most established examples of this particular category, but not simply or its affiliation with UN or Harvard. It is a simple, yet not lame, very nice concept blending quiz gaming, learning outcomes, basic sponsorhip and progressive social change through food donation.

 

 

 

By entering the site, you got instantly faced withthe first question of a quiz game involving wording (English grammar basically), language learning or recently introduced subjects like art, geography of maths. Select your favourite subject and start answering questions.

For every correct answer your score will increase and so your level after a while, but way more importantly 10 grains of rice will be donated through UN's World Food Programme. Yes, 10 grains of rice, for free. Apparently more than 71 billions since 2007. Not bad.

Who funds that? Simply, from the site: "This is made possible by the generosity of the sponsors who advertise on this site".

 

 

 

I find the gaming/learning outcome still rather weak, poorly advertised and a bit clumsy in ots objectives. But I do love the idea.It seems to be much improvable, as mostly focused on the 5-spare-minutes kind of gaming..

 

Any suggestion is here welcome? How would you enrich this model? Gaming Competitions? Incentives? More visual? Partnership with game-makers? Stronger, branded sponsorships? More explicit in the targets?Simply more grand in its learning or entertaining objective?

Perhaps, these could be a good starting point for other attractive options..

Comments (0) >>