A Note About Goodsearch and Goodshop

A Note About GoodSearch and GoodShop

GoodSearch is an organization that provide an opportunity to support the churches and charities in a pain-free and cost-free method. At the end of 2007, after researching Goodsearch, I completed the steps necessary for Fellowship Baptist Church of Salisbury to be able to receive funds from the Goodsearch program. We recently received our check from Goodsearch for 2008 in the amount of $76.56 and I thought this would be a good opportunity to explain the program and to encourage you to use Goodsearch and Goodshop if you use the internet - or have friends and family that use the internet.

How does Goodsearch work?

Goodsearch provides a donation to the church whenever you use Goodsearch to search the internet - instead of using Google or some other search engine. The search results are powered by Yahoo!, so the search results are good results. Anyone who uses the internet already uses some method to search the internet, with Goodsearch, we are simply asking that choice of search engine to be Goodsearch and that the designated charity be Fellowship Baptist Church of Salisbury.

It is a blessing to be able to receive this money and for a small church like Fellowship Baptist Church of Salisbury, even a relatively small amount of money like this can help offset the cost of Sunday School curriculum or Vacation Bible School materials or Jr. Church materials or tracts or bulletins. The more people who use Goodsearch for us, the more we are able to raise. The amount of money raised last year was from a relatively few people searching.

In addition to being able to receive donations by simply using GoodSearch as you search the internet, over the last year or so, Goodsearch has added a program called GoodShop. GoodShop uses the same concept, except that instead of making a donation for searching, it makes a donation when you buy something online by going through GoodShop to get to the store's online presence. The stores represented by GoodShop are places many of us go shopping anyway, such as Wal-Mart, Target, Best Buy, Staples, Petsmart, etc. The difference is that you would be making your purchases online instead of at the store. Depending on the store, you may even be able to make your purchase online and pick it up at the store in person (or have it shipped to you - or to a loved one in another part of the country for Christmas). The amount of donation from Goodshop purchases are a percentage of the overall purchase, so that purchasing that Wii from Wal-Mart could result in a donation of $4.50 (1.5% of $300).

How do I use Goodsearch?

Goodsearch has made the process pretty easy. You can either go directly to the site (www.goodsearch.com) and enter "Fellowship Baptist Church of Salisbury" in the box that asks "Who do you Goodsearch for?". This should only have to be entered once. You could also just simply CLICK HERE and it will already be pre-populated with the information for Fellowship Baptist Church. In addition to this, they also have a Goodsearch toolbar that you use that adds a Goodsearch search box to your Internet browser, allowing you to search for anything you want from anywhere on the internet (using this feature, you don't have to leave the page you are looking at in order to search for something else).

You can Goodsearch at your home computer or from any other computer you use. Even if you don't use the internet very much, perhaps a friend or relative may be willing to "Goodsearch" for us (my sister and mom in Illinois use Goodsearch for our church). If you need help with setting this up, please see me.

While we are not going to raise a large amount of money through this method, it can definitely be a help. If we had just 20 people using Goodsearch an average of five times a day for searching, we would raise $365 during the course of a year.

So, thanks to Goodsearch for the recent donation and thank you to all of you who already use Goodsearch for Fellowship Baptist Church. If you don't, would you consider helping us out in this way? Click here to get started.

Just my thoughts,

Frank

Goodsearch Works!

Goodsearch

An update on Goodsearch. Some of you may remember that in March I blogged about Goodsearch - an organization that donates 1 cent ($.01) to your favorite charity for every search you make on the internet using Goodsearch.

Like many of you, I tend to be a little skeptical of things like this, but I decided to try it out first and then I posted about it and encouraged some others to try it out.

I can now report that Goodsearch actually does what it says it will do!! In December, our church received a check from Goodsearch as promised! The check was in the amount of $49.71. You may think this is nothing to write home about (or blog about), but for a small church like us, this will help us to be able to purchase Sunday School materials for about one quarter - for people doing nothing different that what they already do. (If you look at the "Amount Raised" button, you will see that it says we have raised over $70. According to Goodsearch's website, checks are issued every December for the amount raised through September 30th of the year, so we already have over $20 towards next year.)

For those of you unfamiliar with Goodsearch, it is a search engine that gets paid by advertisers and passes on part of that money to charities. A charity has to register with Goodsearch before being able to received donations and must accumulate at least $20.00 in a year in order to receive donations (which are paid on a yearly basis).

The search engine is powered by Yahoo!, so it works fine as a search engine. Goodsearch also has a toolbar feature that can be downloaded (while I use Internet Explorer, the toolbar is also available in Firefox for you Firefox fans) and allows you to search from any internet page and still benefit your charity. (This is how I usually search, whereas my wife tends to search from Goodsearch's home page.)

SO, here is my comments and my plea. If you want to set it up for your church, go for it. I can vouch for it that it actually does pay as it says it will. If your church does not use Goodsearch, would you consider using Goodsearch as your search engine and designating Fellowship Baptist Church of Salisbury (Salisbury, MD) as your charity. (There is a pre-populated link on the right hand column of this blog to make it easy - or you can click here.)

If 10 people searched 10 times a day using Goodsearch, that would be $365 at the end of the year - not a huge amount to a lot of churches, but we could buy a lot of God's Bridge to Eternal Life tracts with that :) .

Just my thoughts,

Frank

Goodsearch and Blog comments

As some of you may have noticed, I have updated a few things on my blog over the last week or so.

One of the updates that I made was adjusting the categories so that clicking on the categories no longer takes you to the "fake" blog that I created as a work-around for the fact that blogger did not have that feature previously.

I have went through a number of the older posts and added labels, but I have not made it through all of the old posts to add new labels to them yet. I also decided that while I may have a bunch of labels that I actually use on posts, I don't think I will include all of them as side categories. Of course, you can always click a label at the end of a post to see what else has the same label.

I have also added a link to Goodsearch. Goodsearch is a search engine that is powered by Yahoo! and gives money to the charity of your choice each time you use them to search - supposedly about 1 cent a search. Obviously it will not add up to much unless a whole bunch of people use it, but it could perhaps bring in a little extra cash (for instance 10 people performing 5 searches a day would add up to $182.50). Some of the bigger organizations like Cystic Fibrosis Foundation have earned $3,120 according to the Goodsearch web-site, but we are a small church. Goodsearch also offers a Goodsearch toolbar that can be downloaded and used to search with Goodsearch from whatever web-site you are browsing. You need to indicate which charity you would like to get credit for your searching. If your church is not signed up, our church (Fellowship Baptist Church of Salisbury) is on the list of approved charities for which you can search. (This Goodsearch link and the one on the side of the blog take you to the Goodsearch sight with Fellowship Baptist Church of Salisbury prepopulated in the "Who do you Goodsearch for?" section. ) If you use the Goodsearch toolbar, make sure you choose your charity manually (where the toolbar says "My Charity"). I started using this a few weeks ago before putting up the link to make sure that it worked without causing any problems. I use the toolbar primarily. The toolbar also has a popup blocker, which is a nice feature and works pretty well.

Anyway, I am not sure how much blogging I will do in the next week or so. I have done some orientation on Thursday and Friday and I start my first of three night shifts in a row on Tuesday night.

Just my thoughts,

Frank