Good Will, or Private Gain?
Written: Jan 10, 2004
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As one of the largest “charitable” websites on the Internet, The Hunger Site offers concerned websurfers the chance to send a daily mouse click worth of goodwill to impoverished countries across the world. Their aim is noble and their intentions surely commendable, but beyond their guise of charitable benevolence, there is more to The Hunger Site than meets the eye.
Having grown from a tiny corner of the web to a mainstream charitable phenomenon, The Hunger Site can claim achievements rivaled by few. 200 million visitors have clicked away since the program began, and have since then contributed more than 300 million cups of food. More than 100,000 people continue to click for food on a daily basis, contributing tens of thousands of pounds of food in the process. Food has been distributed across 14 different countries, and continues to help many who lack any other resources. All this cannot go without praise, and I certainly am grateful for the Hunger Site for all the efforts it’s made in the name of fighting world hunger.
However, beyond such altruistic principles is a wildly successful and powerful mechanism designed to generate not just handfuls of wheat and rice, but a fair share of profits as well. The Hunger Site, contrary to many people’s belief, is not a nonprofit organization. While they donate a portion of their income, they also keep a undisclosed share of it for themselves. The site is part of a larger family of similar charitable sites operated under the company CharityUSA, LLC, a for-profit company based in Seattle, WA.
It’s important to understand that when well-intentioned users make their daily rounds, the click they make toward world hunger is, to a large degree, a click also towards CharityUSA’s company coffers. After donating roughly 3/4 cup of a certain food staple, users are flooded with corporate logos, banners, and pop-unders, with the expectation that users will patronize such “caring” corporations. (Precedent finds that, indeed, many people do.)
Again, I applaud the efforts of the Hunger Site, and in fact am a visitor to the site myself, but I simply can’t offer the same unconditional praise that many others do. The company is unwilling to disclose what percentage of revenue actually goes to hunger. Nowhere do they publish the salary packages of its executives. And their fine-print disclosure that part of their mission indeed involves making money— and not the kind you donate— strikes me as the slightest bit deceptive.
Overall, I still encourage individuals to offer their daily click, and continue to support a site that uncontestedly helps many, many people. I simply want to point out that their mission isn’t altogether an altruistic one— and to what degree, they refuse to say. As it doesn’t cost individuals anything to contribute, I suppose I can agree that even if a small portion of their profits go to hunger, it’s better than nothing. Still, if the site were a true nonprofit, I wonder how many more people would be sitting down right now for a hot and wholesome meal.
Recommended:
Yes
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