A Creative way to donate to a charity: Gift giving
posted on July 21, 2010
Seth Godin, the marketing expert, had a birthday recently and he wrote on his blog that he didn’t want any gifts for his birthday. Instead, he asked people donate to Charity:Water. http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2010/07/its-not-my-birthday.html This caught our eye because Charity:Water is a charity we wrote about in this blog. http://onepercentglobal.org/blog/2010/06/clean-water-vs-poverty
There are two basic ways of giving to a charity instead of buying a gift for someone. You could donate directly to the charity. Or you could donate through an organization that has a selection of charities featured on their website. What is the difference between these two ways of charity gift giving?
When you donate directly to the charity you can be assured that all the money you donate actually goes to the charity, eliminating the middle man. But how do you determine that a charity you are donating to is a good one? There are organizations that rank charities and here are a couple of them:
http://guidestar.org/ “The non-profits in the Guidestar database are registered with the Internal Revenue Service, or meet IRS requirements for being a tax-exempt organization. In order to be listed as a charity over 60% of the donations need to go out to the target populations.”
http://charitynavigator.org/ “Charity Navigator, America's premier independent charity evaluator, works to advance a more efficient and responsive philanthropic marketplace by evaluating the financial health of over 5,500 of America's largest charities.”
http://www.bbb.org/us/charity/ “The BBB Wise Giving Alliance (the Alliance) helps donors make informed giving decisions and advances high standards of conduct among organizations that solicit contributions from the public.”
What if you just want to get that last-minute holiday gift? Doing all the due diligence yourself may seem like a lot of work. What if you wanted your gift of charity to recognize a particular event, like a wedding? What if you did want to have a physical object to give, but wanted that object to support a population in need? There are organizations on the internet that can help you with these types of needs.
There are so many “charity gift giving” websites that we are not going to list them here, but rather give you an overview of the different types. You can go online and type in “gift giving charity” and you will find organizations that fit your need and your budget.
For example:
Do you want to buy a gift card to give to family or friends, so when they spend it, part of the proceeds will go to a designated charity?
Do you want buy an item that was made by an “at risk” population, the proceeds of which will help them break the cycle of poverty?
Do you want to involve your children, introducing them to the “family tradition” of giving to charities for birthdays and holidays?
Do you want to celebrate a specific event such as a wedding? You could have your wedding guests donate to a group of charities, or a specific charity, rather than buy a gift for the bride and groom.
Do you have a social network of your family, friends, or co-workers that want to donate together? There are websites where you can create “gift challenges” where different “teams” compete to see how much money they can raise over a specific period of time. These websites usually have sophisticated analytics that help you track the amounts raised, where it was distributed, and which team is leading in the fund raising.
This is a sample of the types of websites one can find for charity gift giving.
What one needs to remember is these websites have overhead costs that must be paid: website hosting, administration of the website, credit card fees, etc. The fees charged can be as simple as $0.03 per dollar, or a complex system - “deducting 3% for credit card processing, a $0.50 transaction fee per card plus 5% administrative fee,” as one site states in their FAQ.
One Percent Global vets the organizations featured on this blog, but does not offer additional services like the “charity gift giving” websites. One Percent Global is self supporting and receives no portion of the donations you make to the organizations featured here.
Whatever method you choose, giving directly or going through a website that did the due diligence for you, remember the added bonus of a charity gift: tax deduction. If you are setting up a charity team in a challenge or steering wedding guests to a website, it’s good to remind them that their donations are tax deductible.
Charity gift giving is becoming increasingly popular and is a positive evolution of donating to charity. Charity gift giving solves two pressing issues: the need to donate to worthy causes, and the need to recognize the social and cultural importance of the exchange of gifts in an environment that has too much stuff.
Seth Godin, the marketing expert, had a birthday recently and he wrote on his blog that he didn’t want any gifts for his birthday. Instead, he asked people donate to Charity:Water. http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2010/07/its-not-my-birthday.html This caught our eye because Charity:Water is a charity we wrote about in this blog. http://onepercentglobal.org/blog/2010/06/clean-water-vs-poverty
There are two basic ways of giving to a charity instead of buying a gift for someone. You could donate directly to the charity. Or you could donate through an organization that has a selection of charities featured on their website. What is the difference between these two ways of charity gift giving?
When you donate directly to the charity you can be assured that all the money you donate actually goes to the charity, eliminating the middle man. But how do you determine that a charity you are donating to is a good one? There are organizations that rank charities and here are a couple of them:
http://guidestar.org/ “The non-profits in the Guidestar database are registered with the Internal Revenue Service, or meet IRS requirements for being a tax-exempt organization. In order to be listed as a charity over 60% of the donations need to go out to the target populations.”
http://charitynavigator.org/ “Charity Navigator, America's premier independent charity evaluator, works to advance a more efficient and responsive philanthropic marketplace by evaluating the financial health of over 5,500 of America's largest charities.”
http://www.bbb.org/us/charity/ “The BBB Wise Giving Alliance (the Alliance) helps donors make informed giving decisions and advances high standards of conduct among organizations that solicit contributions from the public.”
What if you just want to get that last-minute holiday gift? Doing all the due diligence yourself may seem like a lot of work. What if you wanted your gift of charity to recognize a particular event, like a wedding? What if you did want to have a physical object to give, but wanted that object to support a population in need? There are organizations on the internet that can help you with these types of needs.
There are so many “charity gift giving” websites that we are not going to list them here, but rather give you an overview of the different types. You can go online and type in “gift giving charity” and you will find organizations that fit your need and your budget.
For example:
Do you want to buy a gift card to give to family or friends, so when they spend it, part of the proceeds will go to a designated charity?
Do you want buy an item that was made by an “at risk” population, the proceeds of which will help them break the cycle of poverty?
Do you want to involve your children, introducing them to the “family tradition” of giving to charities for birthdays and holidays?
Do you want to celebrate a specific event such as a wedding? You could have your wedding guests donate to a group of charities, or a specific charity, rather than buy a gift for the bride and groom.
Do you have a social network of your family, friends, or co-workers that want to donate together? There are websites where you can create “gift challenges” where different “teams” compete to see how much money they can raise over a specific period of time. These websites usually have sophisticated analytics that help you track the amounts raised, where it was distributed, and which team is leading in the fund raising.
This is a sample of the types of websites one can find for charity gift giving.
What one needs to remember is these websites have overhead costs that must be paid: website hosting, administration of the website, credit card fees, etc. The fees charged can be as simple as $0.03 per dollar, or a complex system - “deducting 3% for credit card processing, a $0.50 transaction fee per card plus 5% administrative fee,” as one site states in their FAQ.
One Percent Global vets the organizations featured on this blog, but does not offer additional services like the “charity gift giving” websites. One Percent Global is self supporting and receives no portion of the donations you make to the organizations featured here.
Whatever method you choose, giving directly or going through a website that did the due diligence for you, remember the added bonus of a charity gift: tax deduction. If you are setting up a charity team in a challenge or steering wedding guests to a website, it’s good to remind them that their donations are tax deductible.
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Comments
Gift giving is a nice way of donating, I've done it a few times, not the most exciting, do you have any information on the health lottery (heard about it the other day from a friend but a bit clueless.)