Sunflowers and Rice: Enter the World of Virtual Charity
Sunflowers and Rice: Enter the World of Virtual Charity
November 14, 2007: While corporations donating hefty sums to charity are nothing new, Intel, Apple, Time Life and Fujitsu are taking it to the next level by including virtual interactivity into the world of charity donations.
Planting sunflower seeds and watching them grow may be a favoured past time of fauna watchers the world over, but doing the same thing on your computer screen has a different feel to it. Intel is offering to pay $US 1 to the Boys & Girls club of America for everyone who goes to there Sunflower site and plants a virtual seed.
The Boys & Girls club of America is a charity based organisation who looks after troubled kids after school hours in order to get them off the streets and doing something entertaining and productive. The donation has a cap of $US 45,000 though, so regardless of how many people goto the Intel website and plant Sunflowers, it seems that there is a limited budget for this donation.
Another virtual charity to emerge in recent days is the Free Rice Initiative where people can answer vocabulary based questions and 10 grains of rice will be donated to third world countries for every correct answer. Fujitsu, Time Life and Apple are sponsoring the initiative and will be footing the bill for the donated rice.
One of the questions which can often be asked of these types of charities is why not just donate all of the rice right now instead of waiting for people to click on an item. FreeRice addresses this question directly in a statement on there website “FreeRice is not sitting on a pile of rice, you are earning it 10 grains at a time. Here is how it works. When you play the game, advertisements appear on the bottom of your screen. The money generated by these advertisements is then used to buy the rice. So by playing, you generate the money that pays for the rice donated to hungry people.”