Editor’s Note: This week we are pleased to bring you a guest post from Gil Resh, Co-founder of Stands, a browser extension that lets you use advertisers’ dollars to support the causes you believe in. We’re delighted to be among Stands’ partner organizations. Read on to learn about how Stands got started and why Gil and his team care about fighting malnutrition.

Here at Stands, we’re three experts in online advertising technologies who spent the last 10 years developing innovative products in our space. Like many in our generation, we felt that the professional challenges we were facing, though fulfilling, were still missing something important.

We missed having a way to make an impact that reached farther than just for the companies we served. We were looking for our company to bring change and drive some good in the world. We were striving for an opportunity to combine our daily work with doing good (also known as doing good while doing well).

Supporting a cause in the online space is mostly rendered to likes, shares, and tweets. We believe it’s not enough. We were looking to create a way for people to support a cause continuously, thereby making giving an integral part of the fabric of our everyday lives.

Stands aims to achieve exactly that.

Stands is a browser extension that transforms online browsing into donations for a cause you care about. All you need to do is download the extension, choose your cause to support, and from that moment on you start to generate donations for your cause.

We have developed stands utilizing the following three pillars:

• Users have the right to own their online value - People are no longer the product and they hold the right to participate in online transactions. If an advertiser wants to show our users ads, the user needs to get a clear value. Our users value donations for their cause. Every dollar from advertisers will:
  • Support websites for the content they produce and we enjoy
  • Support a cause that represents the user choice
• Users are entitled to a great web experience - Today the web is cluttered with ads that slow down websites’ loading and compromise our experience. We have developed a faster, cleaner web experience by limiting significantly the number of ads (and it is under the control of the users) and we prioritize content over ads (ads will be loaded only when the content finishes loading)
• Users have a right to privacy - Many companies are tracking users and selling their data. With stands not only are those companies being blocked, but also we at Stands are following very strict privacy guidelines—so even under a subpoena, we cannot track or relate any information to our users. We just don’t collect.   

At Stands, we’re delighted to be partnering with high-quality NGOs like Action Against Hunger. We feel good about helping users make micro-donations to an organization with a lifesaving mission to end malnutrition. The Action Against Hunger team’s passion for change and lack of acceptance of the status quo matches ours. I encourage you to visit us online today and sign up to Take a Stand!