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:
“Literary works cannot be taken over like factories, or literary forms of expression like industrial methods. Realist writing, of which history offers many widely varying examples, is likewise conditioned by the question of how, when and for what class it is made use of.”
—Bertolt Brecht (1898–1956)
“When the history of guilt is written, parents who refuse their children money will be right up there in the Top Ten.”
—Erma Brombeck (20th century)
“It is my conviction that women are the natural orators of the race.”
—Eliza Archard Connor, U.S. suffragist. As quoted in History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 4, ch. 9, by Susan B. Anthony and Ida Husted Harper (1902)