StumbleUpon Launches Program to Help Nonprofits

StumbleUpon is officially launching Stumbling for Good, a new advertising program to help nonprofits increase awareness and site traffic. The San Francisco-based company started the program earlier this summer, initially running a campaign for the World Food Programme, and is now opening up the effort to include more organizations. StumbleUpon, a discovery engine that recommends web and mobile content for its more than 15 million users, will help nonprofits reach users most likely to respond to their messages and engage with them via its new Paid Discovery social media brand ad platform. World Food Programme credits the StumbleUpon campaign for helping it feed more than 5,000 people, making a video to thank the company for its work. "Fundamentally, advertising is all about getting discovered," says Marc Leibowitz, VP-business development and marketing, for StumbleUpon. "We thought about how we could help nonprofits get discovered. That's one of the biggest challenges nonprofits have -- how do they generate awareness which results in people lending their time or money or other resources to help them reach their goals. "The idea behind this program is the same as the idea behind the paid version of Paid Discovery: introducing people to organizations that they might not even have known to look for," Leibowitz says. "That's the premise behind StumbleUpon." StumbleUpon plans to run campaigns for three nonprofits a month, working with each to promote specific assets of the organization and to drive people to a specific URL, anything from videos to blog posts. It plans to select organizations from those that its employees are passionate about as well as nonprofits that approach it. "There are obviously some great causes out there," Leibowitz says. "Over time we're trying to canvass the universe of issues and be even-handed in how we select … and give them enough oomph to give them a significant boost. "We wanted to introduce [our users] to causes that they might not otherwise have known about or known to look for," he says. "We're glad that we can put some nonprofit organizations into that stream of users if we can make the world just a little bit better by sending traffic to people who might take action based on something they saw."

StumbleUpon Launches Program to Help Nonprofits

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