Philanthroper is a site that vets charities, and solicits $1 donations for those it selects. They’ve found a payment service that will process donations for a penny (versus the 30 cents Paypal would take), and the donation goes directly to the charity. The site plans to finance itself with ads, so they’re not taking a cut. Here’s some more information.
We all have our go-to charities, but this looks like a good way for people on a budget to get into the habit of giving, and for those of use with a couple of extra bucks a week to give to a well-vetted charity with an interesting and creative angle on helping others. It launched today, and the signup also gets you involved with a PayPal-like company (which requires a fair amount of personal information), so it’s not for everyone. But it’s worth a look, especially if it proves itself in the next few days and weeks. And I hope that they put some competitive pressure on PayPal to cut their fees for charitable gifts.
Joey Maloney
You misspelled the site’s name in your opening graf.
Shadow's Mom
But the link is correct, so there!
Thanks, MisterMix, I’ll check it out.
mistermix
Fixed, thanks.
Steve
I’m unfamiliar with this Mpayy. Its reliable and secure, yes?
mistermix
@Steve: I have no idea. I did sign up and gave a buck, so if I see any issues I’ll post about it.
terry chay
I don’t believe PayPal always takes 30 cents (or thereabouts). Some companies have a special arrangement with them that will have paypal process the transaction for free (for instance Kiva.org) as long as it is going to a charity/non-profit.
jibeaux
It’s a really nice idea, a dollar a day donation. The only odd thing is that it says they’re still working on a way to give you a tax receipt other than using your mPayy receipts. If you didn’t give much, no big deal, but if you did it daily it would probably be nice to have some sort of receipt to use other than a printout of 365 donations.
I will happily start in February. Unfortunately, in lieu of any sort of bonus, got paid for January on December 22 so this is the longest paycheck-stretching of the year and I’m now into that rolling-pennies-for-gas phase of brokitude. One of these days I have got to figure out how to get my money to stop flying away from me so fast.
Otto Graf von Pfmidtnöchtler-Pízsmőgy (formerly Mumphrey, et al.)
Well, now I’m going to try to get my little non-profit listed there. Thanks for letting us know about this.
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Otto Graf von Pfmidtnöchtler-Pízsmőgy (formerly Mumphrey, et al.)
I will also throw in that I’m looking for donations to pay the Feb. wages for our excellent teacher Veronica Ohl, who’s working at the Blanca Jeanette Kawas Bilingual School in Tela, Honduras. She earns $220 a month.
eemom
charitynavigator.com is good too. It rates charities based on how they spend their money and provides breakdowns, as well as the salaries of the top officers.
I really recommend it. When I checked there recently I found that some charities I’ve given to in the past are not putting my money where I want it to go.
catclub
I just went, and seeing “$32 dollars donated so far”
is just depressing.
Golly, maybe we should put on a musical in old man McGillicuddy’s barn to get the money to build the space shuttle!
artem1s
@eemom:
be aware that charity navigator uses figures that are taken directly from 990s. so a non-profit that is honest and puts the EDs salary in admin or fundraising where it belongs (instead of putting it all under programming costs) may not ‘look’ responsible. I always advise donors to go to guidestar.org where they can download the last 3 years of 990s. Then they can see the details for themselves and judge for themselves.
an organization who has an annual budget of $250K-$500K often looks bad because of its staffing costs and administrative overhead. that doesn’t mean that they aren’t doing vital work for their community.
Also, professional fundraising organizations (almost any disease foundation) won’t show much in the way of staffing expenses at all because they don’t do the research but are ‘pass through’ organizations that pretty much exist to raise money and organize events for other organizations. Some of them spend huge percentages on their fundraising, some not so much.
I find ‘rating’ systems just don’t do a very good job of telling the whole story.
PurpleGirl
artemis: I don’t get the point of your first paragraph. Charitynavigator uses the same 990s that you can get through Guidestar. And unless the IRS has changed the tax form since the last one I worked with, an ED salary is the the category of 5 highest paid employees and requires a break down of salary and benefits.
Murphoney
I’m a little suspicious in general, by nature, but this is not always unjustified.
I visited the site, but I couldn’t find an indication of which 501( c )3s they’d approved nor how their receipts would be divvied up among the list of approved charities. I may have simply missed those details, but the site appears to be a veritable ‘black box’.
I wasn’t made more comfortable by the lack of background/ownership/contact info for the Philanthroper site itself. I had to resort to robtex.com to find out that the webpage, at least, is run out of Chicago.
PurpleGirl
The idea looks interesting and may indeed help small nonprofits which don’t have the resources to do much marketing of themselves. (I worked for a nonprofit for 15 years and know the problems even a medium size group has; my former organization had a staff of ~50 and an annual budget of $4.2 million and it had a hard time getting the story out.)
Chris Grrr
Great find. Definitely want to check this out further, and probably put it to use…
PurpleGirl
@Murphoney: What I got from reading the site and the other article linked to, is they will pick a nonprofit daily to feature. All donations that day will go to that group. They will feature 6 groups a week, one each day with one group featured both Saturday and Sunday.
Murphoney
You’re right, of course — I was expecting an entirely different type of site/set-up and blanked right over the LARGE feature article that took up most of the front-page.
It still leaves questions, but doesn’t suggest any reason to impugn the site’s honesty. It’s good to see where the money will go.
catclub
5 hours later it has soared from $32 to $42 donated.
A little thought says that in spite of the fact that finding a single large donor would swamp what they have gotten so far from small donors, they are aiming at $1 contributions. If instead they had the nominal donation of $5 ( but you can give whatever you want!) I bet they would have almost 5 times what they have gotten so far – a fortune, in other words.
Their framing sucks, in other words.
Patrix
Check out SwipeGood too. Rounds up your expenses to the nearest dollar and lets you donate the accumulated savings at the end of the month to any of the listed charities.