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Facebook, founded by Mark Zuckerberg in 2004, has definitely gained momentum in the world of online social networking. Boasting over 97 million users, just trailing the over 110 million user base which its top competitor MySpace has, Facebook has grown by leaps and bounds. The main strength behind their ability to grow so rapidly and effectively, was the ability of the Facebook team to integrate advertising and marketing into their network, as well as to offer business solutions for companies and corporations, without sacrificing the integrity of their website. Facebook to this day, has an extremely tight grip upon the ability of its members to publish content within their profiles, ensuring that "black hat" advertisers cannot nest harmful HTML code within profiles that could potentially bog down the site, as well as discourage users from using the site due to profile hacking. This has allowed them to greatly minimize the amount of hacked profiles, as well as garbage postings placed solely for revenue generation, within their social network, which can be found in great abundance within their competitors web-sites.
The most valuable feature, introduced in May of 2007, was the Facebook Platform. The Facebook Platform provided a development framework for third-party developers to develop applications or "widgets" for the social network. Everything from photo sharing, comment and picture posting, horoscopes, Texas Hold'em, and friend-interaction applications; the list of widgets has grown to number in the thousands! Unfortunately, by popular opinion, the ratio of "useful" applications and "garbage" or "nearly-useless" applications is a small number in deed. However, a positive aspect of this "widget" community has been the "charity awareness" applications that have been created within Facebook.
Charities themselves are beginning to get involved within Facebook, creating their own pages which users can become fans of, and allowing them to gain more visibility to the public through the Facebook user community. However, before they started upon this initiative, it was solely the applications within Facebook which were promoting charities within the Facebook social network. Unfortunately, there have been a few applications created that were falsely stating intentions of donating proceeds to a charity in order to gain more downloads. Up to this point, this number has been extremely small, and the number of applications actually contributing towards charity awareness and charity donation have greatly out-numbered these "faux" charity Facebook applications.
One of the latest charity awareness/donation applications to hit the scene is "Good Samaritan". Good Samaritan is a combination application, offering discount internet offers to its users, as well as free surveys, in order to generate advertising revenue for its founding company. However, the application appropriately earns its name by donating twenty-five percent of its earnings to the charities that are participating within the application. However, this donation activity is not a blind or blanket process. Instead, Good Samaritan allows its users to select which charity will receive these proceeds before they even select the product, service, or survey that they wish to pursue through the application.
User control and interaction was key to the design of the application. Therefore, it was also decided that Good Samaritan should track the dollar amounts which each user "earns" as a donation for these charities. Thus, each user will be able to know, each and every time that they log into Good Samaritan, exactly how much money was donated to the user's charities of choice during their use of the application. Plus, as charity success and charity awareness is an extremely viral concept, the actual application entry on the user's Facebook profile page displays the amount that was donated to charities through their use of the application, plus the amount which was donated to charities through the use of users who downloaded Good Samaritan due to an invitation from the first user, or by downloading the application through that first user's profile page. This will hopefully assist with promoting user interaction with regards to involving other Facebook users with Good Samaritan, and therefore assisting participating charities even greater. That, combined with a "Top Earners" (listing top earners for charities) and "Charity Awareness" page (allowing users to find out more about participating charities, as well as invite other charities to participate within Good Samaritan), definitely give Good Samaritan a multi-dimensional value to Facebook users.
What about the validity of the Good Samaritan application? Will it truly donate twenty-five percent of its proceeds to the charities as indicated? Well, to begin, each charity that decides to participate within the Good Samaritan application either will have an annual agreement between their organization and Good Samaritan's founding company, or will provide them with some kind of "Linking Agreement" which Good Samaritan must adhere to. This ensures that the relationship between each charity and Good Samaritan is maintained via the proper activity of the application, as agreed to in the annual agreement, and through the proper activity of its founding company in providing payment to each charity, as directed by the choice of the users. This is doubly enforced by the provision of a report, included within each payment to each charity, which will detail each offer or survey which was completed, resulted in a payment, and the listed donation was designated by the user to go to that particular charity. However, a charity's earnings will not be disclosed to anyone other than that particular charity, so no other charity's information will be included on a report issued to a charity.
What charities are currently participating within the application? Currently, "Action Against Hunger" and "The United States Fund for UNICEF" are the only two charities which have elected to participate. Several other charities were contacted and were given the opportunity to participate, but either elected not to participate due to various reasons, or a decision is still pending due to their strict internal approval processes and guidelines. It is Good Samaritan's long-term goal to have many charities participating within the application, giving the users a wider selection of charities to choose from, as well as the ability for Good Samaritan to do greater good by helping a greater number of charities. The participating charities list will be regulated, based upon the size of the user base, as well as the order in which solidification of participation of a charity through a signed agreement between the two organizations takes place, or the provision of a "Linking Agreement" from that organization. Therefore, as the user base becomes large enough to support the addition of another charity, the next charity in line will be inserted into the application. There may or may not be exceptions, due to disasters, or a popular demand of assistance for a charity from the public. However, for the most part, this list will be tightly adhered to in order to first benefit the charities which made an effort to participate through the Good Samaritan application sooner.
In summation, Good Samaritan is a well rounded application. It offers a savings opportunity to Facebook users, due to the discount offers listed within the application which companies are offering to online shoppers. Good Samaritan also offers a sense of accomplishment for online shoppers due to the fact that each user will know that their purchase helped to achieve a donation to the participating charity of their choice. Plus, while Good Samaritan's founding company will turn a profit from the use of the Good Samaritan application, they will be donating twenty-five percent of their earnings to charities. In Corporate America, this is an unheard of endeavor, as the percentage to be donated will never be lowered, and the relationship of donating to each participating charity will be renewed each and every year. Hopefully, Good Samaritan's quality and good deeds will help to set a precedence within the affiliate marketing community, within the Facebook application community, as well as the corporate community. It is the belief of this author that those that can help, should help. Good Samaritan is adhering to this belief and I hope that, in the future, more business owners will too.
