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The NOW COQUITLAM, PORT COQUITLAM, PORT MOODY, ANMORE AND BELCARRA
Wednesday, March 21, 2012
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Local website helping charity
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Kendra Wong editorial@thenownews.com Coquitlam resident Ryan McKenzie is turning the written word into a unique way of donating to charity. McKenzie, along with business partner Kevin Hinton, created the website InfoBarrel.com. The Coquitlam-based business is a crowd-sourced website that allows writers to submit articles for posting. They can then choose whether or not to donate their share of revenues from online advertising to charity. InfoBarrel.com’s charity of choice is the Huntington Society of Canada. Huntington disease is a genetic disorder that affects muscle coordination, leading to incapacitation and eventually death. “We have advertising on the site. Typically, if you’re a writer we give you 75 per cent of the revenue generated by the article,” said McKenzie. “Instead of giving the money to the writer, it goes to charity.” The website also features a charity progress tracker, which is updated weekly, showing how much money has been raised. According to McKenzie, since its launch in 2006, the website has become one of the largest such sites in Canada, with approximately 92,000 members. So far, he said, 1,780 articles have generated more than $2,600 for the Huntington Society. For McKenzie, the cause is close to his heart. “My sister (Courtenay) was diagnosed
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Ryan McKenzie (left) and Kevin Hinton are behind InfoBarrel.com. with the rare disease in 2006, which is what originally sparked my interest in supporting the cause. Since then I have organized numerous other fundraisers outside of InfoBarrel.com, but couldn’t resist the idea of mass collaboration and social media applied to fundraising.” For now, the website remains a compilation of “how tos” ranging from How to Plan a Group Picnic in 6 Easy Steps to Understanding the Capital Gains Tax and Money Saving Strategies and a Beginner’s Guide to Investing. Anyone from Grade 12 students to university professors is encouraged to contribute, McKenzie said. “Our stance is that not everybody has
the money or the time to do things for charity,” he explained. “But everybody is an expert in one field. Why not take 20 or 30 minutes and write down what you know and you can help make a difference?” McKenzie hopes the site will eventually grow into a “destination” for information online. “We want it to become a resource for just about anything you would need to search for,” he said. “It’s not going to be as authoritative as Wikipedia … we’re pushing our writers to continuously produce better content. Our goal is to have the website be a destination for information.”
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