RED is a global fund put together to help the fight against AIDS in Africa. In January 08, Dell and Microsoft joined together to support the cause by creating a RED Product Range. Dell and Microsoft are only the most recent companies to join the product range, already RED have support from Motorola, American Express, Gap, Giorgio Armani, Converse, Apple and Hallmark. The links take you to the RED section for each company to see what they are providing for the charity and how they got involved. You may be thinking, “well this is good but I bet it’ll cost me loads more money to buy the products!” Well it doesn’t! It’s at no extra cost to you, you just have to buy the product and the company that the product is from will give some of its’ profit to the charity.
The products in the Dell RED collection are Printer 948 (PRODUCT) RED, XPS M1530 (PRODUCT) RED, XPS M1330 (PRODUCT) RED and XPS One. Microsoft’s RED Product Collection isn’t quite as expansive as the other companies involved, however it is as equally as interesting. Their RED Product is Windows Vista Ultimate (Product) RED which has been put on all of the Dell Laptops and Desktops mentioned previously in this blog article.
Want to find out a bit more about the charity and what they actually do? The image above is RED’s ‘mission statement’, click on it and you’ll go the the site. On the website there is also an about page.
The site also has some cool features which help publicise RED (e.g. Community Tool Kit and Impact Cards.) Also there is an Impact Calculator which shows you how the money you have spent has helped the organisation by showing you what different products can buy the charity.
We think this is a great way for some of the big companies to get really behind a need in this world and one that we can be part of too! Fantastic Idea!