Back when I was at NetCreations, it used to really burn me to see employees IM-ing each other, checking their personal e-mail and surfing the web for what I assumed were better-paying jobs. In today’s world, I’m sure they’d be checking Facebook and playing Scrabulous.
Now that I’m older and wiser, however, I’ve come to realize that you can’t expect an employee to walk in the door, sit down at his desk and put his nose to the grindstone for the next 10 hours. We humans are social creatures, and the desire to goof off is hard-wired into our DNA (Which is why I now hire only independent contractors).
But last Sunday, while I was waiting in the Newark airport for a flight that was delayed for three hours, I read an article in The New York Times magazine that changed my point of view.
The article told the story of a website called FreeRice.com, an interactive vocabulary game that donates 20 grains of rice to the United Nations’ World Food Program every time you pick the correct definition of the word flashed on your screen. Each time you get one right, the program raises the bar until you’re stumped trying to guess the definition of a word that means something like sea slug in Bulgarian. Then, just as you think your brain is going to explode, the program lowers the bar and shows you some mercy. For closet intellectuals like me, FreeRice.com is about as unaddictive as heroin.
And I’m not the only one who’s hooked. According to the article, some 300,000 to 500,000 people now play FreeRice.com every day–generally during office hours when they’re supposed to be working. Apparently it’s also popular among college kids who are supposed to be studying.
In its first three months, FreeRice.com has generated $250,000 in donations to the World Food Program, thanks to advertisers such as Regent International Hotels, Alibris books and Shutterfly that pay for the banners that appear every time you click on an answer.
In case you’re wondering, FreeRice.com is not one more “free” Big Brother app from Microsoft or Google on a secret mission to collect behavioral or demographic data. It’s the brainchild of John Breen, a self-employed computer programmer from Bloomington, Ind., who originally designed the game to help his son study for the SAT. A few years ago, he created TheHungerSite.com, which raised about $3 million for the World Food Program. According to the article, Breen makes no money from his project and sends the checks he gets from his advertisers straight to the WFP.
As someone who’s chaired many a fundraising dinner and sat on numerous not-for-profit boards, I think there’s a lot to like about FreeRice.com’s approach to charitable giving. For one, you don’t have to pull teeth or trade favors to get people to go there. For another, both the players and the sponsors know exactly where the money is going. And unlike those fancy dinners and charity balls, you can raise money for a good cause without dressing up in uncomfortable clothes and spending the evening away from your family.
Now, I swear I haven’t been playing FreeRice.com during those hours when I’m supposed to be meeting with clients or drumming up business for Axxess, but I did spend some serious time on the site last Sunday and Monday nights. Let’s just say that a lot of rice got donated in my quest to get to Level 49. (Level 55 is the apparently the highest you can go, and, knowing my own competitive nature, I’m sure I’ll eventually get there, no matter how much rice the site’s advertisers have to donate along the way!)
Free rice, anyone?
This entry was posted on Sunday, March 23rd, 2008 at 7:37 am and is filed under Business. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.One Response to “FreeRice.com: Doing Good By Goofing Off”
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March 27th, 2008 at 10:35 am
A friend of mine sent me this and we proceeded to play for about an hour trying to beat each other’s score. When we were done, I didn’t feel like I’d wasted time getting sucked into a random online game. It’s a pretty good idea!
Caroline