Philanthropy Portal Offers Charity and Volunteer Opportunities

Network for Good, an independent, 501(c)(3) organization AOL Time Warner Foundation and AOL, Inc.; the Cisco Systems Foundation and Cisco Systems, Inc.; and Yahoo! Inc., in partnership with over 20 nonprofit foundations and associations, has opened a portal at http://www.networkforgood.org/.

There's a JavaScript thing on the left side of the page for getting more information on various things, but I can't get it to work in Opera or Mozilla. So, instead, I pick a topic from the lower left of the main page. I'm given links to subcategories within those topics AND a link to statistics on that topic's charities and the public support they receive.

Back to the subtopics. Pick one and you're given a page of information; learn more about that particular issue, make a donation, be a volunteer, or speak out. Now, the be a volunteer and speak out sections are fine. But the donate section lists the name of a charity, what it does, and a donate button. If you click on the donate button, you get a page of information about the charity and the opportunity to donate. If it were me, I would rename the donate button "More Info/Donate".

If you don't find the charity in which you're interested on this page, follow the link to http://www.networkforgood.org/donate/index.html, which allows you to search the charity database by keyword or by area of interest and location.

If you've got more time than money, there's http://www.networkforgood.org/volunteer/index.html, which allows you to search for volunteering opportunities by area and interest. Again, this appears to be a JavaScript function I could not get to work in Mozilla or Opera. It worked fine in Netscape, though -- there are 891 volunteer opportunities within 20 miles of 90210.

Finally, there's a "Speak Out" section, which allows you to enter your zip code and get government and media information for your area. There are also topic lists which you can select to get action alerts in that category.

There are a LOT of resources here, but they appear to be well-organized. Sure wish those searches worked in Opera. Worth a look.

Posted to Business-Nonprofits