In an ever-globalised world, new technological advances are making it easier than ever for people to connect across the world. Not only does this help the savvy businessperson, but it can help those who are less fortunate than others.

Sites like Kiva and Accion offer the chance for people to loan small amounts of money (an up-and-coming lending strategy called ‘microcredit’) to those in poorer countries who need it. This allows people in emerging markets who don’t have access to bank loans to gather necessary funds to help their business (and in most cases their local community) grow.

Others like Sparked allow people all over the world to volunteer small amounts of their time for charitable projects in an area of their expertise. This ingenious use of crowdsourcingallows projects to be done quickly, efficiently and—perhaps more importantly for charities—for free.

All this philanthropy is wonderful, of course, but many of these sites, causes and charities operate solely in English (on the web, at least). Are messages, good causes and charitable efforts like these getting stopped in their tracks, purely by being inaccessible to those who don’t speak English?

Recent research by Eurobarometer suggests that a massive 9 out of 10 internet users gravitate towards websites written in their own language. While this has massive consequences for commerce, it’s also going to have the same effect on those that are campaigning for the greater good—that is, fewer visitors and therefore fewer people taking that all-important step to action.

So what’s the solution? Surely if these sites are to reach a vaster audience, they need to turn to the foreign language internet. By reaching out to non-English-speaking internet users, which are growing at a phenomenal rate (particularly in non-G8 countries), these charitable sites could find themselves at the top of the search engines with a far lower investment of both time and money.

And by getting those all-important click-throughs, their campaigns for the greater social good could get even greater indeed.

tags: Crowdsourcing, Foreign Language Internet, Multilingual Marketing, social good