PluggedIn: Click-to-give holiday gift of charity

By Paul Thomasch

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Feeling light in the wallet but generous of heart this holiday season? You can still benefit your favorite cause -- without spending a dime -- via a host of fun and easy Web sites.

Among the most popular charity sites is Free Rice (www.freerice.com), with some 500,000 daily visitors looking to play word games and at the same time donate food for the hungry. Sponsors, who run advertisements on the site, pay for the food.

Free Rice is the brainchild of computer programmer John Breen, who came up with the idea of a vocabulary game to help his son prepare for college entrance exams. Breen later decided the game could also be used to help charities and teamed up with the United Nations World Food Program (WFP).

Here's how it works: A word pops up on the home page of the site, with four short definitions listed below. When you click on the right answer, 20 grains of rice are donated to the WFP by the site's advertisers.

So far, more than 10 billion grains have been donated.

"We get phone calls all day long about the site. People love it, they are delighted by it," said Bettina Luescher, a WFP spokeswoman. "A school child can play this game and a nuclear scientist can play this game."

Those who want to skip the word games have plenty of other click-to-give charities to choose from, including The Animal Rescue Site (www.theanimalrescuesite.com), a partner of Petfinder.com.

Each time a visitor clicks on a large purple rectangle on the right-hand side of the Web site, a donation is made to provide food and shelter for unwanted animals. It also tells you how much was donated with your click -- and the entire operation is sponsor-funded.