Searching For A Way To Fund Education With Catch Tomorrow

Public schools receive funding from state, federal and local governments. Because funding depends on the whim of the public voter, it can fluctuate. While a school may receive enough funding in some years, they may fall short in other years. Catch Tomorrow has set its sights on helping remedy that situation.

Catch Tomorrow isn't the first site to offer funding for education. It is part of the Search Engine Corp network, though, which is the first search engine network I've heard of personally that seems to be dedicated to revenue donation as part of its business plan. As a portal for giving, Catch Tomorrow starts with your state. It has you select it from a large map of the United States on the front page.

After selecting your state, a list of school districts pops up. This gives the chance to make sure the money you raise using Catch Tomorrow as your search engine goes to the school nearest you. That's key in how Catch Tomorrow stands out from the crowd - giving the user a chance to have a say in where their money goes. to their credit, they even had our school district on the list, and ours is miniscule.

Catch Tomorrow states in its business plan that 50% of its revenue gets donated to schools. How does it make its revenue? From ad content displayed on its site and on search engine results. At first I thought that the ads would be annoying or intrusive, but they are no more intrusive than a page running Google Adsense ads. How are these ads able to help schools in real dollars? From their FAQ:

How much money could this generate for a school system?

Remember, Search Engines are projected to generate over $8.2 billion dollars in 2007 from U.S. Paid Search Advertising. If CatchTomorrow.com can capture 2% of American internet users, we estimate that CatchTomorrow.com search can generate approximately 8.1 million dollars quarterly.

I'd love to see the exact numbers behind Catch tomorrow to see how much real revenue they have generated and donated in the last few months of their beta. I have no way of peeking behind the curtain to know if they are achieving their high goals or not, but I hope so. They release a report on the money generated by their site for your district each quarter, and their fourth quarter reports are slated to hit the airwaves in February 2008.

They do offer a tool bar widget that you can drag and drop into your tool bar to make using Catch Tomorrow any time you need to search easier. I find the button rather large, however; so I simply bookmarked the site in a folder I keep for search engines and go to it that way. I found actually using the search engine to be slightly less efficient than Google, but more efficient than Yahoo. I actually prefer using their home page, as it offers some other nice features like a local white pages search widget and other items you can customize.

I mentioned that Catch Tomorrow is part of the Search Engine Corp network. Search Engine Corp specializes in setting up Search Engines for non profits like Catch Tomorrow. Catch Tomorrow is their flag ship site, which was followed closely by two other sites with education funding as their main purpose: Charteroo and Mountain Search. Search Engine Corp is developing several other charitable search engines as well, to be affiliated with animal shelters, veterans associations, climate change groups, children's hospitals and starting school in other countries.

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to profy RSS feed!