Alternative or fun ways to donate to charity?
One of my financial goals for 2024 is to donate more to charity. I have a couple of major charities that I donate to once or twice a year and love the personal touch of a GoFundMe whenever someone I'm in some way connected to needs help but otherwise I find it hard to get motivated to find charities to give to.
I used to donate regularly to Omaze, a Charitable organization that would count your donations as entries in raffles for the chance to win prizes. I never won and never really expected to but it made giving really fun and allowed me to reach a much wider breadth of charities than if I had done the legwork myself. Omaze is now shut down and while I'd rather not have to admit it, making donating fun or even just easier would get me to do it more often.
Does anyone have any recommendations to get my charitable motivation up other than finding worthwhile charities and manually donating myself?
I haven't tried this myself but have read good reviews about it! It's a donation of time, not money, and seems fun enough that there actually seems to be an oversupply of volunteers:
https://amp.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2019/jul/12/be-my-eyes-app-blind-people-helpers
Yeah I have actually never received a request for help, despite having signed up quite a while ago. I suspect there may be even less demand for humans now that they have a startlingly good AI system in the app as well.
I see thanks for sharing your experience with it, I've been curious!
I've been a member since 2017 and have had a total of 3 calls. All were quite fun and included reading instructions (twice on medication and once on a recipe). Those were all before 2021 though so I'm not sure how much things have changed.
You can buy game, book, and software bundles from humble bundle. On the right side of the page, there is an "Adjust Donation" section. If you hit custom amount you can give the charity the maximum amount, though humble will still take a cut.
Online gamer fundraisers with prize raffles (since you used the word fun):
Games Done Quick:
ESA Marathon: February (Make-A-Wish, usually Alzheimerfonden)
Desert Bus For Hope: November (Child's Play Charity)
A little fun fact about Desert Bus for Hope: it's a mini-game developed by Penn and Teller as part of a scrapped mini-game compilation, and a contender for one of the worst games ever made because of how tedious it is. It's a real-time driving simulator of driving from Tuscon to Las Vegas, an 8-hour drive. And you can't pause the game, or leave it unattended because the bus always veers slightly to the right, so you have to manually correct it the entire way.
There are no other cars or people, just eight hours of empty desert road. If you crash, you have to start over. Reach the end, you get one point and the option to drive back to Tuscon.
Basically, charity drives are one of the only reasons anyone would willingly play it to the end. I haven't seen any of the streams but I've heard of them, and they do other stuff during streams to keep people's interest. Which sometimes leads to crashes because the driver isn't paying enough attention to the game.
Basically, I highly recommend it because the whole concept is pretty fun and silly~
If you crash, you don't just start over. You get towed back to Tuscon, in real time, at a significantly slower speed than you were driving to Vegas.
Haven't seen anyone else mention this so here goes: maybe donate somewhere in person. Like next time you go to a museum or botanical garden or zoo or some other cultural event/site, donate right then and there. A lot of nonprofits rely heavily on visitor donations. Could be a fun way of discovering new places to visit or just to support places that you already visit and love.
I like this idea a lot. Exploring new places -- and then supporting them -- is a great way to help out small organizations or off-beat ones while enjoying yourself.
Speaking of off-beat places, I got a tour of a major Masonic Temple one time. They had their own museum, which was interesting in its own right.
Instead of donating money, have you tried to donate your time? For example, I am working in my community to create wildflower meadows in my neighborhood on common areas that can't have buildings on them. You could contact your local river keeper and see if they have clean up events etc. I think it's a nice way to make a difference, and see the effect you have on your local area.
If you want to cut out the burden of looking for a worthwhile charity to support, you can consider donating to one of the GiveWell funds.
GiveWell is an organization that focuses on charity research and maintains a list of most important and effective charities. They also have charity funds that you can donate to and your money will automatically be distributed between impactful charities.
Here's the page which describes all of the funds they have and helps you choose which one you should support:
https://www.givewell.org/our-giving-funds
For me, a personal connection can make things a lot more fulfilling or motivating. My friend and her sister started the Monica Chibuogu Nneji Foundation in honor of their mother, and it makes me happy to support their work.
Although there is no tax benefit for it, I practice radical tipping ($5 minimum for small transactions and 30-50% for larger ones) because it puts money directly in the pockets of underpaid service workers. This is definitely controversial though. I wrote more about it here, and the adjacent comments will offer some of the counterpoint thoughts.
I think @fxgn's suggestion about GiveWell is good if your goal is to reduce friction or maximize effectiveness.
Just FYI, the mean wage of service workers with tips is ~$16/hr, median ~$14/hr as of may 2022 (see fast food and counter workers or waiters and waitresses here), service workers aren't paid particularly less than others in practice. Maybe you just want to give money to random people, and the easiest way is big tips. If so, fair enough, maybe you feel better doing it this way (that is the point of this thread ultimately), but you should be aware that there are charities which do this, if you want to do it "at scale" (Cash transfers)
For me, it's more about being present in the moment and doing something for this particular person who is right in front of me. The world is full of more problems than I can solve even if I gave away all my money. So focusing on the needs of people who enter my sphere is a value that I embrace to keep the soul crushing problems of the world from overwhelming me.
Maybe not so much fun for you I guess, but fun for those in need:
Child's Play recently just celebrated their 20th year of gifting games to sick kids in hospitals. Wiki - anniversary post - Official site
Maybe every time you play a good game this year you donate something of equal value, or browse to your local children's hospital on this handy map and see their amazon wish list for their pediatrics department! They also accept hardware donations.
Buy some bubble solutions or craft kits for sick kids :)
So I don't know if it is fun enough but I donate to Child's Play Charity every year. They help supply video games to sick kids stuck in hospitals. The part I like is that you can pick what hospital you want to support and then view their Amazon wishlist. I love that I can buy games I love to help distract sick kids during the worst time in their lives.
One Simple Wish
I cannot recommend this charity enough! Having come from a traumatic childhood myself, this group's mission would have been incredibly impactful for me as a child. I'm in a better place now, but I am fortunate to have the means to help others. There's no telling how many wishes my husband and I have granted, but it's so fulfilling to know a child in need gets to have a gift of love.
I have two somewhat different suggestions:
Bidding For Good hosts online auctions for charities and charity-adjacent organizations. As you've guessed, you can bid on specific virtual or physical items and your money goes to that organization. Here's an example of AnimalsAsia and their auction pre-pandemic. You can bid on exclusive experiences (like visiting their wildlife sanctuary), art, handcrafts, and even medicine and treats for the bears and other animals they take care of. It's really nice to buy honey treats for the bears. :3
Kiva.org is a non-profit founded by ex-Googlers with an idea that is somewhat controversial. Through their program you can choose to make micro-loans to small business owners and people who otherwise can't secure the small loan they need to improve their quality of life. Generally this is focused towards people in Southeast Asia, Africa, and Central and South America. Particularly farmers, refugees and Internally Displayed Persons (IDPs), and people running very small shops. Some people also need money to meet their sanitation needs, install local solar to provide electricity to their village, and other projects like that. The controversial part is that you're really fronting the money for the in-country loan company to make the loan and it's that company that charges interest on your money. So Kiva provides information about the loan-providing company, the interest rate and whether there's a loss on the exchange rate during repayment, along with some other basics. Once the loan is repaid to you (in installments), you can then lend that money out to someone else.
It's a bit different, but you could also take a look at some volunteer computing projects. One pretty popular example was Folding@Home. It's been around a while, but it got a boost back when COVID-19 popped up. The ArsTechnica article below also gives some further context for these sorts of projects. It would be an indirect way of donating, since your money would go to the increased power bill, and your computing will likely support research rather than something more obviously charitable.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_volunteer_computing_projects
https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/04/how-the-pandemic-revived-a-distributed-computing-project-and-made-history/
Excellent idea! Also great for people who like tinkering with machines and then want to put that surplus computing power to good use.
I'm a big contributor to several BOINC projects. SETI@home and Folding@home were my first projects as early as 2001! Over the years I've had my PS3 using the native Folding@home app doing some crunching. I consider my electricity bill a separate form of charitable donation. :')
Currently my most notable projects that I support are Einstein@Home, which I've been doing the longest and most work completed for; World Community Grid, which I've been putting more compute power towards the past couple years; and one of my personal favorites is CERN's Large Hadron Collider project.