For nearly two years, I have written for this humble blog. As can be expected over time, the amount of visitors has increased from a tiny trickle, to a small trickle. That being said, the amount of unique visits I get a month, roughly 15,000, is a pretty considerable audience for just your average person. Think about it, if someone told you that they spoke to 15,000 people a month about a certain subject, that would seem pretty impressive. The web has allowed anyone, with little or no money, to do just that or more. Taking a step back, I find that absolutely amazing. Taking another step back, I feel a sense of responsibility to use it for more than just finding it absolutely amazing.

Background

In the recent years, I have grown more and more interested in national and global events. Political views aside, my new found interest and awareness in international happenings made me all the more committed to do something. I knew my contribution would be small, but a small ripple is better than no ripple at all. My natural inclination was to use my site as a vehicle to help as it reached far more people than I personally could ever do off the web. Soon after beginning the alterations of this site to push those ends, it dawned on me not only how unbelievably simple it was, but how much it improved my site. The extra content and features added a greater richness to it that my writing alone could not provide. The things people are doing around the world astounds me and the fact that this site informs a few extra people about them makes this destination a better experience to the readers.

More than ever, the general public has a voice to speak to a mass audience. So what are people doing with this relatively new podium? Like all things, some people use it for good, some people use it for bad and the overwhelming majority use it in a fairly neutral manner. I admit that up until a couple months ago, I had no intentions for my site to create any change (good or bad). Sure, I may write an article or two that some might find useful, but no one’s life was going to be dramatically better due to direct or indirect actions through my blog. It came to me that with increasing traffic (which will hopefully continue to increase) I had a chance to do something which I hope would make a difference (albeit an extremely small one). I decided to create a two features: Comment Love – a project where for each comment on my site, I donate to a non-profit organization and Designing Good – a weekly collection of links where design/designers are helping their community or the world in general. Both these projects are small and have a minimal impact, but my hope is they help. My greater hope however is that other people will begin to do things similar to this. I write this not to promote what I am doing but to promote the idea of doing something extra with the megaphone that you created with your site.

As new media designers/developers/bloggers, we have the unique opportunity to reach large masses of people with little to no money whatsoever. There are people in public office (albeit very few) that do not reach as many people on a daily basis than my site does. Once that realization hit me, I was immediately both amazed and inspired by what could be done through this site. I cannot help but imagine what could be done if more designers/bloggers do just a little with the traffic that goes to their site to raise awareness or generate donations. Real change could occur. This blows me away.

Do Not Know Where to Start?

Here are a few ideas for things you can do with your site/blog to do your part:

1. Inform your audience on how one can better people’s lives within the focus of your site/blog. As web designers, a perfect example of this is to not just show how to create accessible sites, but to explain how this actually effects people’s lives in a positive way.
2. Write about how something/someone related to the focus of your site/blog that is being a force for good. Promoting that site/cause/person may just help it move forward or gain momentum.
3. Branch your site/blog out to cover a cause that interests you. I have decided to make mine global warming and public media. If done correctly, your new found subjects will just not distract your audience, but will inform them on another subject. In addition, you just may gain some new readers.
4. Give something away for free that you might otherwise be able to sell. It’s not going to save starving children, but it fosters a ideology that not everything we do needs to be equated to monetary gain.
5. Give something back to your readers. Once again, giving is contagious – you might just convince other people to do the same in their own way…
6. Make your site an outlet for others to give of their time. An example of this is for web designers is to post pro-bono jobs for charitable organizations on your site to allow others the chance to donate their time.
7. Donate your services/expertise elsewhere. If you built/maintain your own site/blog, and especially if you write about design or development on the web, show off your chops by giving away from help to some organizations that could use your help. You could even use the experience as a writeup/case-study for your blog…
8. Replace a portion of your ads with pro-bono promotions of worthwhile causes. Sure, ad revenue is nice, but so is knowing that you are funneling traffic to a worthwhile cause.
9. Advertise for local and/or responsible businesses. CPM rates be damned, if you can make close to what you were making and support good businesses, by all means do it. Dell will survive without you.
10. Let the charitable organization you are supporting know what you are doing. Not to brag of course, but to create a dialog in order to maximize your efforts for their needs.
11. Get others to do the same. My site is not going to make a big dent, but a thousand of similar-sized sites will.

Conclusion

I want to put great emphasis that what I am doing is not special. Honestly, my efforts are literally not much more than raising a finger. I write this in the hope that others might consider using their site to do much more than my humble site could. From personal experience, I can tell you the example above can be very easy to execute on your site. Start small and simple, you will be amazed at what you can do and I am convinced you will feel better for it. You do not need to (nor should you) hit people over the head with any cause you support – I really do think a lot of people want to help or are at least willing to spend a little time learning about it. If they are not, no problem. If you want to give something back but cannot think of a cause to contribute to, just open up the newspaper and I guarantee you will find something in five minutes. There is plenty of things that need fixing, we just need people who are willing to help fix it. Why not use your site to do just that?

Links to Charitable Organizations or Resources

• Universal Giving
• Doctors Without Borders
• KQED (supported on this site)
• Carbonfund.org (supported on this site)
• TerraPass (supported and advertised on this site)