Amazon donates 0.5% of the price of your purchases to the charity of your choice

This is fantastic!<p>To save the most lives, select Against Malaria Foundation as your charity. It&#x27;s the current top recommendation from Givewell (<a href="http://www.givewell.org" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.givewell.org</a>), an excellent charity evaluation organization. They focus on proven cost-effectiveness and transparency.<p>AMF can save lives at a rate of $2500 or so per life saved, which vastly outperforms most other giving opportunities, at least if you require a high standard of evidence. Givewell&#x27;s evaluation of AMF is here: <a href="http://www.givewell.org/international/top-charities/AMF" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.givewell.org&#x2F;international&#x2F;top-charities&#x2F;AMF</a>

The first thing I thought when I saw this was awesome!<p>The second thing I thought was that I&#x27;d never remember to use it.<p>Just whipped up a tiny little chrome extension that will always redirect you to smile.amazon.com when you go to Amazon. It&#x27;s not well tested, so could screw you up a bunch, but figured I&#x27;d share.<p><a href="https://github.com/jessepollak/smile" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;jessepollak&#x2F;smile</a>

Errr, out of 1 million eligible 501c&#x27;s how many are &quot;controversial&quot;? as in political shills or fronts for religious nut jobs?<p>I wonder how Amazon plans to deal with the inevitable &quot;why did you donate to a charity supporting &#x2F; opposing $ISSUE?<p>Edit: well kids that&#x27;s what happens if you comment before coffee - a negative take on something that has a decent potential to up the level of giving USA wide by a huge margin. Visit givewell.org and choose your favourite.<p>may as well make that prime account count - let me know when the UK can join in too.

FWIW, I work helping the non-profit site www.thegivingmachine.co.uk. We give 2.25% of purchases tracked through our site from Amazon (plus some other retailers).<p>We also have a lot of other merchants signed up.

Previous Discussion (4 days ago):<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6643676" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=6643676</a>

Amazon may be making <i>more</i> profit on these purchases, rather than less--utilizing the potent marketing skills of non-profit organizations to direct more dollars to Amazon without Amazon having to pay higher affiliate fees. I&#x27;m not an expert, but I think Amazon&#x27;s affiliate fees can be as high as 10% of the purchase price. 0.5% is a 20x cheaper customer acquisition cost.

There&#x27;s a catch... It only works if you go to <a href="http://smile.amazon.com" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;smile.amazon.com</a>, using the regular amazon won&#x27;t do anything.

I wouldn&#x27;t expect it to be too difficult to incorporate one&#x27;s own charity these days.<p>A 0.5% effective rebate on everything you purchase on Amazon is better than many bank accounts offer...

Is this forever? Why are we just hearing about this now - and from a mallard?

yup that&#x27;s also the amount of taxes amazon&#x27;s paying in europe

This is great news! Keep it up!