Summary

  • Freerice, launched in 2007, attached a ten-grain reward to a correct quiz answer; advertisers financed the aid.
  • WFP reported US$1 million in sponsor funding for 2008. Groups and rankings arrived with the 2010 relaunch.

Ten grains of rice is a magnificently small prize. You could win several rounds and still have an unimpressive lunch. That smallness was part of Freerice’s appeal: a large, remote problem became something a person could contribute to between two vocabulary questions.

The site began in 2007. WFP’s report for that year recorded the new website as a way to raise both awareness and money. By the time WFP announced Freerice 2.0 in September 2010, the proposition was brisk enough to explain in a breath: answer correctly, earn ten grains for food aid, tackle the next question.

The banner picked up the cheque

The rice had a payer. WFP’s 2010 announcement described advertisers donating the ten-grain reward. Players supplied answers and attention; sponsors supplied funding; WFP handled the aid. The grain counter gave the first participant an immediate result while the other participants did the financial and operational work.

The 2008 annual report, published in May 2009, puts money beside the picture. Sponsors displaying banners on the site supplied US$1 million during 2008 to fund the initiative. The same paragraph says the site generated enough rice to feed two million people for a day, benefiting projects in Bangladesh, Cambodia, Myanmar, Nepal and Uganda.

Those figures tell the story in different units. One describes a year’s sponsor money. The other expresses food as one-day rations. A website could make ten grains look satisfying; a report had to show the much larger transaction behind them.

That division of labour made the quiz accessible. A player could join in without deciding how much cash to give. The advertiser acquired an association with a useful activity. WFP joined a familiar online habit to an institution capable of turning funding into food programmes. Charity had borrowed the advertising banner and found it an unusually respectable job.

Good deeds, with a scoreboard

Freerice also gave the brain more to do. English vocabulary was joined by subjects including art, mathematics, chemistry and other languages. Questions grew harder as play progressed. Another correct answer offered two small satisfactions: knowing something and adding to the total.

The 2010 relaunch made the total social. Players could form groups, compete and appear in rankings; teachers could organise contests within a class or between classes. Sharing through Facebook and Twitter extended the invitation beyond the quiz page. A solitary vocabulary exercise had acquired teammates and rivals.

There is a splendidly human wrinkle here. Generosity can be sincere and still enjoy beating the class next door. Group totals gave a participant another reason to return. Whether that extra visit produced extra funding depended on the sponsorship arrangement; the leaderboard itself was very good at displaying the visit’s game result.

In its September 2010 release, WFP reported cumulative rice sufficient for 4.2 million people for one day. That scale depended on an institution, advertisers and many repeated answers working together. The interface condensed the arrangement into something almost comically modest. Ten grains. Try another word.