Toms Shoes is a company based on a brilliant but simple idea:

“For every pair (of shoes) you purchase, Toms will give a pair of shoes to a child in need.“

This succeeds on a couple of important levels:

1. Every time you wear a pair of Toms Shoes you can feel good about helping others.
2. These are more than ‘just shoes’. If someone else asks you about your Toms Shoes, you can quickly relate a story that possibly compels the other person to buy some Toms for themselves.
3. As such, word of Toms spreads virally (albeit with some help from an AT&T commercial) allowing them to sell more shoes and do more good.

All of this got me thinking… Could you apply the same business model to the world of web design? For every web site we design, could we design a free web site for a non-profit? The proceeds from the commercial site would help fund the non-profit site. The two sites would be linked in much the same way as sister cities.

 photo credit: hnnhlh14