Let’s talk dollars and sense: even in the best of times, arts organizations live and die by the support of their fans and contributors, and every dime and donation makes a huge difference to the success or failure of that group’s projects. Great Noise Ensemble is no exception to this rule, but in addition to our traditional forms of raising money to fund our programs, we’ve found a fantastic new partner with which we can work to raise financial support: iGive.com.

Contributing to Great Noise Ensemble through iGive.com is pretty simple, and more importantly, is tax-deductible and actually costs you no money out-of-pocket: donations are given as a percentage of your online purchase price at participating retailers or through a static $0.01 donation when using the search function at iSearchiGive. In other words, by taking a few seconds to begin your online shopping or searching at the iGive website, with very little extra effort and no extra money out of your wallet, you can help Great Noise Ensemble plan and present the cutting-edge new music programming that we’ve brought you for the past four seasons (and believe me, we can use the help: we’ve got some outstanding programs planned for Season 5.)

The principle is simple: iGive donates a varying percentage of your purchase price back to Great Noise Ensemble every time you make a purchase after reaching participating retailers through the iGive.com website. iGive has partnered with more than 700 of the best sites on the web (including almost every major store chain you can think of and online retailers such as Amazon.com, iTunes, and eBay) to offer donations of up to 26% of the cost of your purchase and even special rates and discounts over and above the normal percentage price. None of this increases the cost of what you buy, it just sends some of that spending to iGive’s causes.

The first step is easy: log on to iGive.com and sign up for a free membership, and select Great Noise Ensemble as your cause of choice. Then whenever you need to search or shop for something online, stop by iGive or iSearchiGive first and use their search function to find what you’re looking for: the search will net us a donation, as will your purchase.

Even if you don’t do much shopping online, you can still make a donation every time you search for information (even without joining iGive) by using iSearchGive as your search engine.

Already with only one purchase, a supporter has added ten dollars to our operating budget: can you imagine the impact it would make if each of our listeners helped us out this way? Thanks in advance for your participation and help: go join iGive and start supporting Great Noise Ensemble!