Now the news is a portal to giving

A new service, good2gether, links news stories on social issues to nonprofits addressing the issue. The service, called Good2gether (G2G), allows readers of a news story to click through directly from the story to donate to an associated nonprofit's website. Launch cities include San Francisco, Boston, Atlanta, Houston, New York and Philadelphia.

How does it work? Nonprofits post profiles (why don't they just pull from Guidestar? - see below on business model), stories run, Good2gether provides media outlets text with associated npo info to run in a sidebar. Reader reads story, gets interested, clicks on npo link in sidebar, reads profile, takes action. Cost to NPO? Time to create and update profile, no cash.

Business model: Nonprofits can sell up to six sponsorships to companies and list those in its profile. Cost of such sponsorship - at least $100. Of that money, 35% goes to G2G, 65% stays with nonprofit. So nonprofits become outsourced salespeople for G2G - sponsorship fee and percentage don't seem linked to click throughs, actions, or anything else - if a npo sells $600 worth of sponsorships and uploads profile to the site, G2G gets $210 off the top, even if links to NPO never run or no-one ever clicks through to npo.

Shout out to Sarah Duxbury and SF Business Times for the story.

My questions:

1) Can nonprofits pay to be linked to "news terms" the way they might pay for search terms?
2) Who vets which npos are listed with which kind of story?
3) Are there other fees or percentages taken when a reader clicks?
4) G2G also works directly with media companies and company sponsors - in essence it is a "cause related marketing" widget intermediary - serving up cause and marketing together.
5) Will G2G make public the dollar value, time value of contributions it facilitates?
6) Who audits these transactions and on behalf of whom? G2G, nonprofits, sponsors?

Good2gether may be taking embedded giving into a whole new realm - it acts as intermediary for all sides of the relationship (sponsor, media co, and nonprofit) and embeds news into nonprofit solicitations and nonprofit solicitations into the news.

All info above is gleaned from good2gether website and the SF Business Times story. It is my interpretation of how this works.

Tags: philanthropy, embeddedgiving