Go on a $3 Trillion Shopping Spree

While it's nice to have a great mission statement and a lot of earnest copy and graphics on your nonprofit Web site, there's nothing like a clever or fun hook to get people to engage with your cause in a creative way.

It's been estimated that the U.S. conflict in Iraq will end up costing the country $3 trillion. To illustrate just how much money this actually is, the 3 Trillion Dollar Shopping Spree invites you to go shopping for all the things you would like to spend the money on. Wind turbines to power all of the United States? End world hunger completely for one year? Achieve universal literacy? You still have one trillion eight hundred billion dollars left over!

Once you're ready to check out, you can virtually "give" your purchases to a friend to direct them back to the site. The 3 Trillion Dollar Shopping Spree also invites you to add a product to help further illustrate the point Nobel-Prizewinning economist Joseph Stiglitz argues in his book The Three Trillion Dollar War:

Just counting the zeroes on the $3 trillion price tag of the Iraq War is enough to induce hyperventilation. But what does $3 trillion really mean? It’s difficult even to comprehend a number that big. Well, try filling your shopping cart with what the cost of the Iraq War could buy: healthcare for every American? A new home for every subprime borrower now facing foreclosure? An Ivy League university? You haven’t even gotten started.

The site is a project of Brave New Films, an activist organization that uses Internet video campaigns to challenge corporate media and encourage political action.

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