Singapore, 24 October 2008 – LOCAL search and directory engine rednano.sg today unveiled a programme to give charities a boost in highlighting their work and needs.

The programme, called “Rednano Gives”, enables selected organisations to make greater use of the company’s Directory listings and search engine marketing staff’s expertise without paying the fees charged for such services.

Rednano.sg’s chief executive Paul Jansen said: “The value for the first set of charities to be invited to participate will exceed $500,000.

“They will receive a three-year package consisting of, among other things, highlighting of their listings in the Directory so that they better attract attention, Click To Call which allows fuss-free one-touch connections from the web page to the charity concerned, and a bundle of keywords which will led to their webpages surfacing on our search and directory engine’s results page whenever anyone looks for information concerning these words.”

These will enhance their basic listings already in Rednano’s Directory, provided to them for free.

Mr Jansen said: “In fact, we give free basic listings not only to charities but extend this to all commercial and industrial firms as well. The latter pay Rednano for enhancements in order to catch the eye of the Internet user and promote their goods and services.”

The first invitations to the shortlist of charities will be sent from next month (November).

Said Mr Jansen: “We were planning to launch this in December. But the collapse of Lehman Brothers on September 15 and the resulting wave upon wave of bad news including Singapore’s plunge into technical recession, sent alarm bells through our company.

This was the genesis of the early launch of Rednano Gives – an immediate opening up of the special capabilities and unique combination of features characterising Singapore’s homegrown search and directory engine, to help those in need.

On Friday, 24 October, The Straits Times reported a leading volunteer organisation stating that the global economic crisis could force companies to cut back on charitable work and donations.

Mr Winston Lee, Product Manager of Rednano Directory, who is involved in the operation of Rednano Gives, drew up a framework for selecting charities, which could benefit from the way Rednano serves Internet users and companies and shortlisted 98 charity organisations for this project.

He said: “This is only the first cut. It is an on-going programme. We intend to help others. Also, as those on the current list reach a happy state where they need less help from us, we will replace them with others.”

He said that a progressive rollout was necessary as the Rednano Gives programme will cost the company. Mr Lee explained that, for instance, there are hardware costs, including for such things as storing the additional information and serving it out, communication and consultancy costs in drawing up special bundles of keywords for various charities handling different needs. In addition, Rednano will also bear promotional costs associated with drawing the public’s attention to the Rednano Gives programme and the list of charities selected.

Mr Johnson Goh, Vice President, Marketing for rednano.sg, observed that more charity organisations are becoming online savvy and increasingly using online as a channel to communicate to their donors. He felt confident that the charities would benefit from the programme because of the way Rednano’s user-friendly engine works.

“Traditional directories have an archaic drill-down approach which requires a user to go through a long and tedious search before he reaches the answer he’s looking for. With Rednano Directory, a user looking to help disadvantage children need only type “help children” to be brought immediately to a children’s charity.”

He added: “We made this possible with our decision to take a different approach to search for local information when we launched Rednano on March 18 this year.

Someone looking for a dentist or a an ethnic restaurant needed only to type meaningful English terms like ‘toothache’, or ‘hungry’ to get what he wanted instead of typing “dentist’ or “restaurant” and then working his way onward from there.”

“So why not apply this efficient, user-friendly method to helping charities too?”

Mr Lyndon Yeo, Director of Sales for rednano.sg, added: “We hope that other online directories such as Yellow Pages, The Green Book and eGuide will follow our lead in offering more visibility to charities.”



For more information, please contact:

Pauline Leong
MarCom Manager
SPH Search Pte Ltd
Tel : 6319 2728
HP: 9848 1308
Email : paulineleong@rednano.sg