History
The 2004 Boxing Day Tsunami provided the initial inspiration to create a program to do this with a simple checkbox on a single web site which invited customers to add $2.00 for a charity to the purchase of a travel insurance policy. Within a few months this had raised $50,000. Based on this surprise success, Footprints was re-engineered so that people could donate to location-specific, project based initiatives which improved collections still further and provided the donor with a tangible connection to their choice of project.
After the success of project-based donations, the team decided if they really wanted to make a BIG difference, they needed to share their technology with other e-businesses: to build a network of e-businesses across the globe willing to raise a lot more money for tangible charitable projects.
And so it was that an API was developed making the technology available — for free — for e-businesses (Electronic business) to integrate into their web sites. More partners means reaching more customers and raising more money to fund more projects. All from $2 donations.
The Footprints Network has set itself the goal to raise $1 billion by 2018.
Read more about this topic: Footprints Network
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“Boys forget what their country means by just reading “the land of the free” in history books. Then they get to be men, they forget even more. Liberty’s too precious a thing to be buried in books.”
—Sidney Buchman (1902–1975)
“The foregoing generations beheld God and nature face to face; we, through their eyes. Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe? Why should not we have a poetry and philosophy of insight and not of tradition, and a religion by revelation to us, and not the history of theirs?”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“I feel as tall as you.”
—Ellis Meredith, U.S. suffragist. As quoted in History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 4, ch. 14, by Susan B. Anthony and Ida Husted Harper (1902)