The Blog Pound

Thursday, June 04, 2009 , evening

A free and easy way to support Wee Paws: GoodSearch.com

Here’s a free and painless way to support Wee Paws every time you search the Internet! Go to GoodSearch.com and select Wee Paws Animal Sanctuary as your charity of choice, then install their toolbar or search box (or search via their website). Wee Paws gets a few cents for every Internet search you do, and in the course of a year, it can add up to quite a lot! Last year we had one person using the GoodSearch feature and we received $25 as a result of her efforts, so it’s a great way to help out while not really altering your Internet routine. The toolbar is absolutely safe and spyware-free, and is a simplified version of the Yahoo toolbar. If you don’t want to install the entire toolbar, you can just add Goodsearch as an option in the small “search box” available at the top of most browsers, and if you don’t want to make any changes to your browser, you can set GoodSearch.com as your homepage and do your searches from there. As long as you allow GoodSearch to set a cookie so it can remember you’ve chosen Wee Paws as the charity you’re supporting, you won’t have to do anything but search as you would normally.

You can of course decide to use GoodSearch to support any of the other thousands of charities they have listed—they seem to work with everyone from the largest charities to the smallest. The only thing I’ll say about Wee Paws is that I absolutely, positively guarantee that every penny you donate to us (via any means) goes to pay for the care of the animals. When I receive a donation I either use it to buy something the animals need, or I set it aside for later use… we’ve never used a penny of a donation on ourselves. Every time we foster a cat or bring in another stray off the streets, it’s because you’ve given us the money to do it. There are times the Wee Paws critters are eating better than the Wee Paws humans, but that’s because I want to ensure we develop a reputation for using our donations properly. We’ve put a moratorium on taking in any more permanent residents until we figure out our living arrangements, but once that’s settled, I plan to hunker down and try to expand Wee Paws by a few cats every year. I especially want to be able to start to work with senior citizens, to see about arranging to take in cats when people are hospitalized or pass away. Besides caring for bottle-babies, I think that will end up being our future—some hospice-type care for chronically ill and elderly felines, and a retirement home for cats who lose their owners to old age. I hate it when senior citizens avoid getting pets for fear they’ll outlive the animal, so maybe we can step in and help. Oh, I want to offer more long-term care for the pets of families in transition—for example, caring for the cat of someone in the military who is deployed overseas, or looking after cats while families are between homes (like we did with Buddy and Wilbur). There are so many ways to help, and the more support we get from the general public, the more we can get done.

If you feel so inclined, would you pass on word about GoodSearch to your friends if you have a blog? Again, it doesn’t matter what charity they decide to support, but the application deserves to be promoted and used by more people. Also, a big thank you to our friend Helena at Living and Dying in 3/4 Time, who told me about GoodSearch at least a year ago, but I neglected to post about it. Thank you, Helena, and thank you for the $25 you earned for us last year!

Posted by Leigh-Ann on 06/04 at 08:08 PM
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