Supporting a charity online, when you cannot give money
Not everyone can donate. Almost everyone can make a cause easier to find — and for a small foundation, being found is most of the battle.
Small charities do not lose because their cause is weak. They lose because nobody finds them. If you cannot give money, the most useful thing you can do costs nothing: make us easier to find.
Share the work, not the logo. A post about one village that now has drinking water travels much further than a post about an organisation. Say what changed and for whom.
Use the hashtags people actually search. #GivingTuesday, which began in the United States in 2012 and is now marked worldwide, is the single busiest giving day online. #Fundraising and #Crowdfunding are where people look for causes to back. #CleanWater and #WASH are where the water sector talks to itself, which is where partners come from.
Tag the people who did the work. When a local company installs a system, naming them is both accurate and useful — it puts the story in front of an audience that would never have found us.
Leave a review or a comment where you found us. Search engines and donors both read them, and a small charity has very few of either.
And if you want to see what your sharing supports, our work page shows where the Foundation’s systems are running and which villages are still waiting.