Many artists, musicians and brands, among others, have pledged royalties or some sort of funding to social justice groups.

In 2021, Jeff Tweedy, guitarist for the band Wilco, told CBS’ Anthony Mason: “We have a large segment of our population that worked to build this country and were never paid for it. That needs to be repaired.”

He told Rolling Stone that injustices faced by the black artists who built the music industry and were continuously financially slighted by the record labels. “It’s not an exaggeration to say our culture wouldn’t be our culture without Black genius,” he said in an interview with Rolling Stone in June 2020.

Since then, several media companies have emerged to support social causes through data. One online company — ShareThis, which enables users to share content — launched its own initiative, Data for Good, which provides advertisers with a Social Justice audience segment from global data sourced from the open web. Another company that uses data to take a more sophisticated look at bias and equality will also launch soon.

Aimed at brands wanting to support racial equality, ShareThis’ program, Data for Good, address critical social issues serviced more than 75 brand advertisers with cause-focused data, activating audience segments.

These segments include animal welfare; climate change and the environment; education, gender equality, poverty and hunger, social justice and empowerment, and women’s rights.

ShareThis donates up to 20% of the proceeds generated from each audience segment, and to date the program has donated to non-profit organizations including Inner-City Weightlifting, The Trevor Project, and Leukemia & Lymphoma Society.

There are more than 75 brands participating in the ShareThis program. Henry Robinson, media manager at Charlotte’s Web, an ecommerce company that sells a range of CBD products, plans to donate through the program a 40 Acre Co-Op with its ad spend, supporting the first nationwide cooperative for socially disadvantaged farmers.

Brands have been using ShareThis data to target consumers who engage with cause-based topics like climate change, sustainability, social justice, gender equality, and more.

Whether a brand is promoting an eco-friendly product or aligning creative messaging with overarching corporate initiatives, Data For Good aims to help brands focus on a niche.

The data comes from more than 3 million publishers that use ShareThis technology. Through JavaScript code ShareThis has on those 3 million publisher pages, the company can observe and collect real-time user behaviors across the open web. Based on the keywords and topics included in the content someone has shared, clicked, browsed or searched, each user is then bucketed into an appropriate audience segment for subsequent targeting. ShareThis’ data collection methodology is privacy compliant and transparent.

It’s all first-party data collected by ShareThis on the websites of participating publishers when site visitors use our industry-leading free sharing tool.

ShareThis Data for Good segments are available on more than 40 platforms across the programmatic media ecosystem including LiveRamp Data Marketplace, The Trade Desk, Xandr, Yahoo, and Google Display & Video 360.

These data and insights can be used to reach and impact key audiences for organizations looking to address social issues that both ShareThis and its customers believe in.

Artists, musicians, brands and others have pledged royalties, funding and commitments to social justice. Media companies have joined and more are on the way.