Connecting with Charities
One of the big highlights of Squidoo, something that really sets it apart from other expertise/recommendation websites, is your ability to automatically send your royalties to charity. Squidoo users have raised tens of thousands of dollars for charity in just the past few months! That translates to real world achievement, like funding schools in Cambodia, reading rooms in India, contributing to important cancer research, sending HIV medicine to hundreds of children, rescuing animals, and a lot more.
How can you support some really great charities using Squidoo?
1. Set your lens to support a charity
2. What should you make your charity lens about?
3. Tiny donations add up
4. Fun stats of the week
5. Lensmaster Interview
Join us in learning how you can make a difference by building lenses that support our charities. Just one lens can make a difference, and could keep donating royalties for years to come.
~Kimberly Dawn Wells, Editor of the SquidU Review
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1. Set your lens to support a charity
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Hooray! Your lens made a little money! Want to learn how you can be a superstar and send that money directly to charity? Squidoo makes it easy.
First, visit your dashboard. Then click on the link to your lens of choice to go to its edit page.
In the dark grey column on the right, scroll down one, two, three, FOUR sections to the line titled “Payment Options.” Click the orange “edit” button.
Here you’ll see a drop-down menu that lists the charities. You can set your royalties to go to the Squidoo Charity Fund, and let Squidoo decide who gets the honors each month, or select a specific charity. You can even play around and set percentages of your lens to go to various sources.
For the best results, your lens should sell something directly related to the topic of your lens. Try some of the newest moneymakers that make it easy to sell cookware, sporting goods, and digital cameras!
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2. What Should You Make Your Charity Lens About?
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A lot of lensmasters are hesitant to create lenses for charity because they just aren’t sure where to start. Here are three tips for lens topics:
1. Go obvious: Match your lens topic directly to the charity.
Make a lens in the theme of the charity. Stay relevant and help them tell their story. For instance, Lensmaster “Timefortravel” supports the Asante Africa Foundation with her lens on African travel and life (http://www.squidoo.com/asante). “Cryptic Fragments” has a lens on communicating with cats supports no-kill cat shelters (http://www.squidoo.com/cattalker).
2. Get creative: Connect your topic to the charity in clever ways.
Sometimes you just can’t build a lens directly related to the charity, but you can get creative with your associations. The Polly Klaas Foundation works to find missing children and prevent children from going missing, and Gadgets That Prevent You from Losing Things helps you, well, avoid losing things! http://www.squidoo.com/pollyklaas..dontloseyourkeys/
3. Do your own thing (every little bit helps!): Create an entirely unrelated lens, but quietly support the charity at the same time.
Your third option is to create a lens that is totally unrelated to the charity topic. The most popular of these is books. Everyone loves books and everyone has their favorites. In about fifteen minutes, you can create a Top Five book list and ship your proceeds off to charity. “Genglo” has a Vegetarian Easter lens that supports the Ferrets Unlimited organization. http://www.squidoo.com/FerretsUnlimited/easter
As long as you design a lens that has solid content and is well organized, it doesn’t have to be related to your charity. Just be sure to include a few relevant money makers and Squidoo will make your monthly donations a nobrainer!
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3. Tiny Donations Add Up
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Think your ten cents here and twenty cents there don’t make a difference? Think again.
People are often afraid to donate if they know they can only donate a little bit. “Oh,” they think, “it would be so embarrassing to only give fifty cents, so I’m better off just saying no.” If 50,000 people didn’t donate anything because they didn’t think their little bit would matter, we’d have nothing.
But what if everybody donated “just a little bit?” What if 50,000 people donated just a dollar a month - that would be $600,000 in a year!! And get this: it’s not like you’re digging into your pockets to do it. You’re getting “free” money from Squidoo and sending it to charity. Doesn’t that feel good!
The concept of microdonations has never been hotter–or more impactful–and Squidoo is leading the charge.
If you’re like me, you have lenses that don’t sell anything specific and just make a few cents here and there from those Google ads and SquidOffers. If you set a handful of those lenses to go to charity, that’s an extra few dollars each month that an organization can use for cancer research, school supplies, or to find a loving home for an abandoned golden retriever puppy. (That’s right, I’m turning the cute factor way up!)
Get started today by finding a charity that interests you: http://www.squidoo.com/squidoocharities/
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4. Fun Stats of the Week
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Did you know?
- Squidoo currently supports 75+ charities that in turn support pets, medicine, education, the arts, and more.
- Squidoo recently partnered with the Covenant House, working together to help shelter homeless children. Why not take 5 minutes and make a Books That Changed Your Life lens, and sit back and watch the royalties accrue for Covenant house, a nickel or a dime a month:
http://www.squidoo.com/covenanthouse/hq
- In February alone, lensmasters donated nearly $5000 to the Squidoo Charity Fund (which has recently donated big chunks to orgs like Modest Needs, Donors Choose, JDRF and Acumen Fund). In February you also raised an additional $5000+–distributed among 75 charities. (Room to Read being a huge favorite). WOW!
- Any charity that is interested can register at http://www.squidoo.com/pages/getdonations
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5. Lensmaster Profile
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Are you passionate about your charities? Smartie lensmaster Rusty-Quill says, “If you create lenses about topics you are passionate about, it will show.”
Boy will it.
Find out more, here: http://www.squidu.com/Profiles/rustyquill
