Donate Without Giving Cash

Throughout the year it can be very difficult to donate to your favorite charity, especially when you have that birthday, anniversary, wedding, graduation or Christmas gift competing for your hard earned money. You really want to donate but it may have to wait until your next pay period when things are not so tight.

One thing I recently learned about and wanted to share with you regarding charity and technology is an option called “Amazon Smile.” I will show you how to set it up later, but first I want to give you some of my thoughts.

From AmazonSmiles website:

“AmazonSmile is a simple and automatic way for you to support your favorite charitable organization every time you shop, at no cost to you. When you shop at Smile.Amazon.com, you’ll find the exact same low prices, vast selection and convenient shopping experience as Amazon.com, with the added bonus that Amazon will donate a portion of the purchase price to your favorite charitable organization.”

Acknowledgement

First and foremost, this is NOT an endorsement for any of these technologies. As someone in the computer field for over 20 years, this was not something I was aware of and I figured I would share my discovery. This article is only to show you what I have come across, if you find anything additional or know of any other technologies to make donations easier, please feel free to share via the comments section at the bottom of this page.

Secondly, I do recognize that this is a marketing strategy and the biggest benefactor is the company selling the product, not the charity. The charity itself gets a very modest percentage, but my thought was “…so what, I was going to make a purchase anyway”, why not mention “Catering to Cats and Dogs” before I click purchase. It is not costing me anything additional except for a few moments of my time to setup my account, and besides, something (no matter how small) is better than nothing.

The Actual Donation

AmazonSmile will contribute a half of a percent of whatever you purchase. Yes, as I originally mentioned it was a small portion, but again, they won’t contribute anything if you don’t use it.

Because I was curious, I went back and looked at my purchasing history on Amazon and found that I have spent $1,346.93. If I had designated Catering to Cats and Dogs as my charity of choice then they would have received $6.73. Now I know that is not a ton of money but my thought buy propecia generic online was, what if everyone on our current subscriber list did the exact same thing I did (about 500 people)? If this had been the case then “Catering to Cats and Dogs” would have received a check for $3,367.33 – now that is a BIG difference. This is the main reason I am writing this article. There is power in the masses!

As it currently stands “Catering to Cats and Dogs” is now setup as the charity that I support on my AmazonSmile, all future purchases that are made will support “Catering to Cats and Dogs”, and here is how you can do the same.

Go to https://Smile.Amazon.com

  1. First, You will be prompted to search for a charity, just search for “Catering to Cats and Dogs” (we would appreciate being your choice of charity to support).
  2.  Click on Search and you should find “Catering to Cats and Dogs”.
  3.  After you find “Catering to Cats and Dogs”, choose “Select”

AddSmile

Once you have chosen C2CND you will see us reflected at the top left of your screen

Smile1

That’s it…all of your future purchases that you were going to purchase anyway will now benefit C2CND and we greatly appreciate that.

One caveat is that you do need to use https://smile.amazon.com for all purchases, it’s the same as the regular site, except you are telling Amazon to make a donation on your purchase when you use “Smile”.

Start

Another neat feature is, in the future, if for some reason you forget to use Smile.Amazon and go directly to Amazon.com they will occasionally remind you to use Smile if you want the donation to count.

amazon smile

Now don’t get me wrong, I am not saying that this should substitute actual donations. Just to put this into perspective for you, at 0.5% (a half of a percent) this means if you wanted to donate $50 dollars to Catering to Cats and Dogs you would need to spend $10,000 dollars on AmazonSmile.

My objective is to show you an additional means to contribute as you go about your daily routine, something very simple and takes little effort. My other hope is to encourage enough people do this, if that was the case, then all those small contributions will add up and save many deserving pet lives.

You can read more about Smile here: https://smile.amazon.com/about

Future Stories:

Update (4/19/2015):

I finally used Smile.Amazon with a real purchase and after you make a purchase you are able to post and share that your support on your Facebook page, and this is what it looked like:

SmileAmazon