I was hoping this would be implemented as:<p>- I sign up to donate at least a dollar a day.<p>- There is a growing list of non-profits supported.<p>- I get emails with newly added ones.<p>- For each non-profit I get to choose to either:<p>a) add a full additional dollar a day for that organization<p>or<p>b) add the new organization to a list of organizations that split my daily existing donation amount.<p>or<p>c) skip it.<p>I dislike this implementation for a number of reasons.<p>* From the non-profits perspective, re-occuring and emotionally invested donations are much more valuable than a one off big shot of money.<p>* From my perspective I will never donate to an unknown entity regardless of filtering criteria. I have limited resources and believe I can have the impact I want to have by chosen where to use those resources.<p>* If this system catches on I imagine it will result in many a controversy, which may just be the price dollaraday.co is willing to pay, but it sure seems like an unnecessary distraction.
I _love_ the idea of getting a daily email that tells you about a worthy nonprofit that you might not otherwise hear about, and this system makes it dead-simple to make micro-donations to each charity.<p>However, I _hate_ the idea of donating to a black box. True, Dollar a Day publishes its criteria for selecting nonprofits, but those criteria are highly subjective. And, according to the FAQ, there's no way to opt out of donating to a particular featured nonprofit that you don't want to support. Heck, even if you cancel your monthly "subscription," your money will still go to all of the nonprofits that are in the queue for the rest of the month.<p>I understand the organization's decision to make things simple to start out, but I hope that it soon offers a way to opt out on a charity-by-charity basis (it could be as simple as a link in the daily email), and pro-rated refunds so that if you decide to stop donating on Day 1 of the month, you're not on the hook for days 2-30.
Not saying this isn't valuable, but I believe that Google did this a year or two ago: <a href="https://onetoday.google.com/" rel="nofollow">https://onetoday.google.com/</a><p>What's the differentiation?
This approach would make sense if most charities were similar in how much better they could make the world with your dollar. But instead there are huge differences! For example, if we look just at developing world health we see a power law distribution, where a few interventions are much better than the rest. [1] Instead of signing up to give small amounts to lots of different organizations, it's much better to find one working on one of these best approaches (givewell.org is helpful here) and fund that more.<p>[1] <a href="http://www.jefftk.com/daly-per-1000-usd.png" rel="nofollow">http://www.jefftk.com/daly-per-1000-usd.png</a>
As someone who has spent a lot of time in the non-profit and B-Corp space, I'm very interested to see how this plays out. It's an interesting idea and one that can definitely have a lot of value if it resonates with donors.<p>However, I do worry about that last point. One of the most important part of NPO fundraising is around building a relationship with the donor. Dollar a Day seems to take that piece out of the fundraising process, for better or worse.<p>Best case, outsourcing your donor outreach to Dollar a Day opens you up to thousands of new donors who get to learn more about you.<p>Worst case, it's Groupon for non-profit donations; taking away your ability to market your brand and spamming you into a few million inboxes who will likely unsubscribe after a 3-6 months of daily emails.
Isn't this essentially the same thing as One Today?<p><a href="https://onetoday.google.com/" rel="nofollow">https://onetoday.google.com/</a>
Really nice concept<p>I _DO_ wish you would display this information a little more prominently instead of burying it in the FAQ. There are many companies that fundraise for non-profits that take a cut of donations and are _not_ nonprofit themselves. You aren't doing this. Good!<p>Q: Is Dollar a Day a nonprofit?<p>A: Yes, we’re a nonprofit too! Dollar a Day was built by a team of (almost entirely) volunteers, and our minimal expenses are covered by a few direct donations. Dollar a Day makes no money, in any way, from donations on this site.
Keeping you anonymous to the charity to preventing them from spamming you with mail is maybe the best part of this pitch. Even well run charities send a tremendous amount of mail after you give a donation. It's one of the big turnoffs I have about the whole donation process.
I hate the whole credit processing fee bit -- Why are 2+% of all donations going towards VISA? There should be a direct deposit through your bank card or something!
Once or twice a year, I go to <a href="http://www.charitynavigator.org/" rel="nofollow">http://www.charitynavigator.org/</a> to do my own research and donate to a charity that I think will make good use of the money.<p>Lump sum method has two advantages:<p>1) Easier to keep track of for tax filing.<p>2) Your employer might have a donation match program. Again it is easier to file a form and tell them to make a matching donation.
Personally, I'd want an opt-out too...I don't mind a default of charitable, but for me to be on board, it'd be essential to be able to disable my contribution should I find the organization uncharitable.<p>More than that though, I think it'd be neat if this group hooked up with giv2giv.org and each day/dollar would create a new, well-funded endowment. And maybe give users a way to vote for their favorite reruns or something so there'd be a bit of a feedback loop.<p>Anyway, congrats to them for a basically good idea. I agree that there are some refinements that would make it a bit more palatable for me personally, but I dig it. I love innovation in this space.
I created a non-profit with a similar concept about 5 years ago called Vonate.org (now defunct). Our concept was $1/month and you would vote/donate (vonate) your dollar to one of the two featured organizations. I'm a big believer in the micro donation space, but execution is key.<p>My biggest lessons learned were:<p>1) Find and vetting 24 great organizations was difficult.
2) Getting people to spend $15/year (how we covered costs) was a challenge, so keep your expectations on audience engagement incredibly low.
3) Revenue through sponsorships won't keep the lights on.<p>Regardless - best of luck.
How is this any different than Google One Today (<a href="https://onetoday.google.com/" rel="nofollow">https://onetoday.google.com/</a>)? At least with Google, I trust them with money, plus, the app has a lot more than just $1/day if you really care about a cause. It has the game mechanics, too, so, I'm sorry, but I'm sticking with Google.
This is an awesome idea. I like the idea of waking up and getting an email "this is who you helped without even knowing it!".<p>The detractors are missing two important points:<p>1) People like being part of a larger movement.<p>2) People like knowing their donation as impact. I would rather be part of a team donating $1,000 then just donating $1.<p>I signed up for the free email, but if I like what I see I'll be joining.
<i>"all donations are 100% US tax-deductible."</i><p>The tax-deductability of charitable donations has always sat weirdly with me. It's not exactly charitable if you're not actually sacrificing anything; it's more a rearrangement of your tax allocation. That can be a good thing in and of itself, but if you're going to claim donations on tax, it's not really something you should get a warm, fuzzy feeling for (in my opinion). I have a regular payment to MSF happening every month, and it doesn't really sit right with me that I can claim it on tax (and I don't).<p>On the other hand, this is a good argument against the libertarian dot-point that private charity 'would happen if we weren't taxed so much'. Given that you can offset your tax by your charitable donations, it becomes a zero-sum game, so why aren't people currently donating at the levels libertarians say they <i>theoretically</i> would? In the US, you can deduct up to half your gross income from tax, and given that the tax load is less than 50%, you can at least convert your income tax to charitable donations, and then start this theoretical "extra charity" that would apparently spring into action.
They should run it like a city or country. Not everyone can be bothered to find these nonprofits. The community should be able to nominate nonprofits and and vote on which one gets the funding every day. Then they'll have to worry about sybil attacks, though.<p>Usually the way to avoid voting attacks is to take the hotornot approach and only present random startups for rating by users. But that doesn't prevent sybil attacks - in order to prevent those you need signup to be expensive. How do you do that? Requiring text to a mobile number used to work until Google Voice. Now what?
It would be great if the daily email included the amount being sent to today's charity. It would be a nice feeling to see this number go up over time.
It seems a good idea that can also be applied to open source projects who ask for donations. You could donate just to support the concept of open source.
My attitude towards charity is kind of the opposite. If I am to donate to charity, I want to concentrate on one or a few things, so that I'm able to actually research them and see for myself whether I think that the money will come to good use.<p>This kind of thing is different from people going door to door, collecting money; instead of someone actively going to <i>you</i> in order to convince you to give to some "good" (according to them) cause, <i>you</i> are the active participant. There isn't much immediate social guilt of having to say "no", in this case. People who collect for charities in the usual, door to door or through other means of confronting people probably want to play on people's feeling of social dignity and that they don't want to appear to be stingy. So then the average person ends up giving to a lot of different charities - because they all ask for a little at a time - and knowing little about each one.<p>But why would I <i>deliberately</i> want to diversify my charity, if <i>I'm</i> the one who is actively subscribing to it? Isn't it better to research a few good ones, and actively pursue those? Why give up that choice to some other entity, and make it practically impossible for me to keep up with all the different causes (you can't and won't feel motivated to research where every dollar you give goes to, when it all goes to different things). Another user here has it right - it's a black box. And apparently for no good reason.
I must ask this question and someone please enlighten me but --
1. Where does money come from to support these Organization ( e.g. dollaraday or Watsi ?<p>2. How do these Organizations pay for developer costs , website, office maintenance and employee salary ?<p>Do they take cut from donation and donate rest of the money ? If that's the case then its pretty much scam.<p>Susan Komen for women's breast cancer collect millions of dollar. Innocent people pay thinking money is going to cancer research. But they instead pay their CEO some $500k+ salary. What a shame !<p>I must ask this is starting a non-profit new legal scam in United States to collect money ?