Public Good

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Who else uses this?

We’re adding new partners all the time but our long-term partners include CNN, Gannett, Cox Media, Upworthy, Tribune, Meredith Broadcasting, Univision, Lyft, Atlassian, Brandless and many more.

How do I get started?

If you represent a media organization or brand, contact us at media@publicgood.com so we can assist you by talking through your strategic and impact-oriented goals and providing an implementation plan that fits. At a very minimum, you’ll need to get a partner-id from us in order to get started.

How do you pick the nonprofits that show up?

Public Good maintains listings for all legally recognized 501(c)(3) nonprofits in the United States. At last count that was 1.1 million organizations! When a user interacts with a Public Good widget, our technology ensures that the organizations who benefit from your readers’ actions are relevant to the content or story that provides the context.

Public Good also creates cause pages for issues happening in breaking news so people can take action on the important issues of the day. When we do this we select organizations to highlight based on the following criteria:
1. IRS standing — We confirm that the organization is in good standing with the IRS and is a 501(c)(3).
2. Watchlists — We check to make sure that the organization doesn’t appear on watchlists such as the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Hatewatch list and United Nations Sanction list.
3. Size — We look for organizations with over $250,000 annual revenue in the last year. Falling under that amount wouldn’t keep an organization from appearing on a Public Good-curated page, but we would do extra diligence through our internal screening (see below).
4. Internal screening team — We have a core team of people at Public Good who have worked with and for nonprofits for a long time. We know nonprofits. Our team looks closely at the nonprofit using media checks to screen for press and articles about the organization, verification that the organization still works on the issue, and that they are still active in the community.
5. Data — Public Good has amassed one of the largest databases of nonprofit information. It includes public records, licensed data, and data we’ve collected ourselves. This lets our screeners and algorithms consider everything from how long an organization has been working on a problem, their financial history, management changes, and much more.
6. Outreach — If we still have questions, we may reach out to the organization to let them know we’re considering them for a cause page so we can find out a little more about them.
As our partner you can determine which organizations you do or do not want displayed in the context of your content, of course.

So, how does it work? How does it know what to display?

The cause that the widgets surface, the actions that users can take, and the organizations that benefit from the actions can be determined by you or by us, depending on your goals.

If you’re doing a trial-run or have a single or small set of causes you want to focus on, we’ll provide you an example published on our demo WordPress site with instructions showing exactly what your shortcode should look like to get those results.

If you’re looking to take your integration to the next level, we’ll use our automatic classification system–which utilizes a rules engine and machine-learning algorithms–to yield highly accurate results at scale. This solution is recommended for partners who publish a lot of actionable content. We call this auto. Even with auto in place, you, as our partner, can specify a lot of the rules that determine what is displayed and when. Otherwise, we’re glad to make recommendations based on best practices.

Can we pick the nonprofits that show up? The causes? The specific actions?

Yes! Let’s talk. This all part of what we discover together as we plan an implementation with you.

What options do we have to customize our widget?

Our default approach is to deliver widgets in your preferred brand colors. We do have options to whitelist the widgets, replacing our logo with yours as well. This option is reserved for partners and brands who enter into an agreement with us.

What do I do if I want to hide a widget?

If you see a widget referencing a cause that is out of context or if you see a widget showing up on content that, for editorial reasons, you prefer it would not, you can login to Public Good, submit the URL and hide it. Emil us if you have not already and we’ll make sure you have an account and send you back instructions on hiding our widgets.

Do you charge for this?

We do not charge bloggers or news media outlets to use our products. If you are a brand interested in our cause marketing solutions, we’d love to hear from you.

Why do you need to load javascript?

Our script enables our classification system to work it’s magic, determining the best results based on the specific content displayed on each article. This also allows us to be flexible and work with you to use multiple types of widgets and publish and point to new campaigns as news breaks.

We do have other implementation options available if, for any reason, you are unable to add javascript to your site. These options may however be limited in function. We can schedule a technical call or provide more details if you’re interested.