Google was in the mode for giving this year, with tens of millions of dollars donated to charitable organizations and noble causes. Of course, Google didn’t stop there. They released huge amounts of content to the open source community, gave away 65,000 netbooks, and created a charitable Chrome extension that let users raise money by opening new tabs.
We previously reported on the details of Chrome for a Cause, but the project is now over and the Chrome blog has the results. Unsurprisingly, the effort reached the charitable donation cap of a million dollars; a staggering 60,599,541 tabs were opened by users of Chrome for a Cause over the five days that Google ran the extension.
Since users were able to select one of five different charities at the end of each day, “donating their tabs” gained some significance in how the funds would be allocated. The charitable cause that comes out ahead is Doctors Without Borders, a group aimed at administering vaccinations, which received 26.7% of all donations. However, both planting trees (via the NPO The Nature Conservancy) and providing clean water (in partnership with the group charity: water) were popular donations, with 24.5% and 23.4% of the total donation pool, respectively. The remaining donation options were publishing books from local authors in foreign countries (in partnership with Room to Read), which received 14.2%, and building homes for destitute families in Latin America (with the charitable volunteer program Un Techo para mi País), which received 11.2%.
The donations will be presented at the end of the year, and some of the charitable organizations have made statements about how they intend to use these donated funds. Users who want to continue using Chrome for a Cause for future charitable promotions from Google can simply keep the extension installed to receive updates on upcoming “tabbing for charity” events.
