Are You Pondering What I'm Pondering?

Online companies are much more involved than they were three years ago. Amazon, Yahoo, Google, and even Apple have changed their sites to provide links or other means of supporting those impacted by the earthquake and tsunami in Asia.

This reflects a few things:

• These companies are backed by people who are willing to do what they can to help, even if it’s as trivial as linking to other sites with information on how to help.
• These companies are agile; it takes a day or so to respond with a new home page or the creation of a 1-click donate site.
• People go to these sites for information. I would have thought traditional media outlets like TV or newspapers or even online news sites would be sufficient, but a fair number of people seem to be using these links as well.
• These companies are willing to break away from their expected role— Apple has little to do with the tsunami or relief efforts. On one hand, you could argue that these are PR moves by the companies to increase their image of global goodwill. It seems a bit weird to me, but having read the internal emails that got sent around before Google posted links, it seems like it was actually motivated by good will.

Anyway, I was pretty careful about who I donated money to. I’m skeptical of how large non-profits use funds so I finally decided on Asha for Education which uses over 98% of funds on program expenses. They seem to focus on education but are also responding to requests to help out with tsunami relief.