The Hungersite

3.6 - just a number? You may suspect an interest rate or price, yet it's much more important than that. Every three point six seconds someone in the world dies of hunger, and three quarters of the 24,000 daily deaths are children under five years old. Yet there's a way to feed them which won't cost you a penny; it's called The Hunger Site.

• The basics
• Where does the food go?
• How it really works
• Is it worth it?
• Do any other sites do it?
• Discussion/Other Articles

Feed the starving for free

The basics

Click through to www.thehungersite.com and amid a pile of banners you'll see an orange button in the middle of the site's front page. The emblazoned message is 'Click here to give - it's free!' Do so and a cup of a staple foodstuff is bought for someone somewhere, who is hungry.

The logic behind this site is brilliant. It's a win-win-win situation for the starving, the internet user, and the sponsors: in practical terms they receive cost effective feel good public relations, especially powerful in helping promote ethical brands.

Where does the food go?

The Hunger Site is a US driven site, so while 70% of the donations go to alleviating hunger in the developing world, 30% do help those within the US. Yet clicks from anywhere in the world count (the UK is the second biggest clicker).

The food is distributed by Mercy Corps, a large US charity which provides aid in 74 countries including Ethiopia, Guatemala, Somalia and Kosovo; and Feeding America (previously known as America's Second Harvest), which helps support the homeless, the elderly, disaster victims and many more groups in the US.

How much food is given?

In the year 2000 The Hunger Site paid for over 9,500 tons of food to be distributed, enough to feed nearly 400,000 people daily. Sadly management issues and a drop in advertising rates meant the amount donated plummeted. However the recovery has been ongoing and by the end of 2008, 3,800 tons of food were delivered; enough for over 160,000 people and over 10 million more cups than in 2007.

How it really works

The Hunger Site is a very clever idea. In effect it's an advertising site where much of the profit is distributed to charity. Though, in actual fact, the organisation behind the site these days, CharityUSA.com, isn't a charity; it's a profit-making company.

It makes its money by selling merchandise on the back of the site itself; though crucially all the charity click money goes to feed the starving. And as you don't need to buy anything and the charities themselves confirm they get the cash, who cares?

The mechanics

Technically The Hunger Site's sponsors don't pay when you click the 'feed the starving' button; it's more complex. They pay when you directly click through to them via the sponsor's page; at a rough rate of 20p per click.

The amount of food donated from clicking the button is thus a nominal figure derived from the estimated 'click-through' rate to a sponsor's page; a standard internet advertising procedure. My estimate is it's around 0.5p per 'feed the starving' button click.

As a comparison, for an ad on search engine Google you'd pay 1p to £60 per click depending on how high up the ad list you want to be. Thus the ads on the Hungersite aren't particularly expensive, plus they're prominently placed and people like the association. Also the demographics show a disproportionate number of affluent older women do most of the clicks, often a difficult-to-reach advertising audience.

If you want to donate more to charity, you can of course give money yourself. Yet rather than just handing over the cash, check out the Charity: Pay Less, Give More guide to find out how to maximise your donations by using Giftaid and Payroll Giving.

Is it worth it?

Taking time to click really helps, especially if you do it daily. The Hunger Site offers an e-mail daily prompt reminder service (signing up to it also gives an additional two cups of food). The site then places a cookie on your computer (this means it then knows who you are whenever you go to the site) so you can see how many times you've managed to click in the current year. Though if you don't want this, it can be disabled.

Do any other sites do it?

The Hunger Site has now been around for over nine years and its parent company has set up a number of sister sites to help support breast cancer treatment, child health, literacy, the rainforests and animal rescue. These all help in a similar way.

Better still when you link through to one of these sites all of them are connected to each other. So you can run through clicking them all together if you chose.

Instead of clicking, play a game

There's also a great website that raises funds for charity by getting its sponsors to make a rice donation for every user it gets; but you've got to play a game to earn it.

Simply click on FreeRice.com and a word will be displayed with four possible definitions. All you need to do is guess the correct definition and for every word you get right, 10 grains of rice will be donated to the World Food Programme.

This site is really quite wonderful as you can easily clock up a few thousand grains of rice in 20 minutes - enough to feed a person for several days - depending on how good you are (and how addictive you find it) plus there's no limit to how much rice you can tot up per day.

It happens in the UK too, make sure you keep up to date

The ‘click and give' model has also worked in the UK too, though there has never been a permanent deal available. Previously the charities Whizz-Kids, the National Society for Epilepsy and Water Aid have all benefitted.