When Charities Receive Donations Because I Clicked, Where Do They Get the Money From?
Charity Miles boasts that you “make money for charity” just by going for a walk with your phone in your pocket. Other apps like Donate a Photo and Tinbox channel money to charity and give you the feeling that you’ve donated without actually opening your wallet. So where does the money actually come from?
This is not your money (and you shouldn’t think so)
To be clear, we’re not talking about apps that help you donate your own money to charity, like Instead or One Today . It’s pretty straightforward. But apps that let you donate “for free” have to get their money from somewhere .
In most cases, this money comes from corporate application sponsors. (Some collect advertising revenue instead or additionally.) Corporations often donate a small percentage of their profits to charity, and instead of donating directly to charity, they can instead donate through a charitable app.
In most cases, the sponsor has already donated this money to charity. Your actions, using the application, simply affect where the money is spent, whether it is being spent. For example, Walking the Dog will send sponsor money to your chosen shelter. Your miles do not affect the total amount donated, but the donation is distributed based on the miles you and other users have earned. So you can benefit your shelter by using the app, but that also means money is diverted from someone else’s shelter.
Or take “Donate Photo” as another example. It is operated by Johnson & Johnson, which has an ongoing commitment to helping health-related charities . They say they will donate a dollar for every photo you upload. But if you hadn’t uploaded your photo, that dollar would be idle until someone else uploads it.
If not enough people upload photos or walk miles, the company may stop giving, at least through this app. So it’s true that you made their charitable donations possible in a way. But on the other hand, companies that use these apps have already decided to make a donation and are holding it hostage until enough people share their hashtags.
You sacrifice your vision and goodwill
Sure, companies could just go and write a check to the charity of their choice, but they can benefit themselves, and often the charity, by making money jump through a few hoops first. They call it leverage .
For example, a company could create a matching program in which any money an employee donates would be matched against the corporation’s own funds. The company could also spend some of its own advertising dollars to promote its new partnership with a charity. It raises awareness of charity (good for them) and improves the company’s image by associating it with a cause of good (good for the company).
Here’s how Charity Miles explains the motivation of its sponsors:
Our sponsors want to make good use of their ad budgets, but they need ad results to be able to reallocate those large (non-charitable) budgets. Thus, we provide premium, higher quality advertisements than conventional banner advertisements. We enable them to measure the high-quality return on investment (ROI) of their investment and thus reallocate the majority of their advertising budgets to social needs.
In other words, the company wants to receive “premium … advertising” when donating to charity. And who are they advertising to? Oh right. You.
Businesses also benefit from charitable applications
Your charitable app activities benefit more than just charitable organizations. Let’s see where your money goes.
We’ve already mentioned ads, but it’s a little more complicated than just showing ads. Take Check in for Good , for example: the app seduces companies with the promise that “ardent supporters of [the charitable organization] will become your regular customers.” In other words, if you register with a particular burger establishment to support your favorite charity, the burger burger makes a profit because you order dinner.
Your charitable miles dollars will go in a more roundabout way. Let’s say you go to the aid of a hungry organization called Feeding America . Your miles are sponsored by Humana Insurance. So, of course, as you walk, you have a big Humana ad on your screen.
If you scroll down for more details, you’ll see an offer from Humana for $ 10 off registrations for the Rock N Roll Marathon Series . Humana sponsors these races and her name appears on all banners and websites. So, while you go to charity, one commercial company (Humana) advertises another commercial company ( Competitor , which runs the Rock N Roll marathon series) … which in turn provides advertisements for Humana. So, you are not donating your own money to charity, but you are being invited to open your own wallet to benefit some commercial companies .
Charitable applications themselves are sometimes commercial ventures. Charity Miles gets a 50% discount: each mile traveled earns 25 cents for a charity of your choice, but also donates 25 cents to Charity Miles itself .
Feeding America , to use our example, gets four stars from Charity Navigator , in part because it is extremely efficient. More than 98 percent of donations go directly to charity. But if Humana wants to spend $ 50,000 on charity miles, only $ 24,625 goes to charity. A little went to cover Feeding America’s overhead costs, and in the end, Charity Miles received more money than the charity itself.
You are actually donating your personal information
Read the charity apps’ terms of service and privacy policy to understand what you are really donating. Here are some examples we extracted from the small print:
- Check Well : Personal information, including demographics and preferences, and your location. Plus, of course, you give the restaurant your lunch budget.
- Charity Miles : A complex network of advertising and promotional offers discussed above. There’s even the option to earn points for your Walgreens loyalty card.
- Gift Photo : You are literally gifting your photographs by providing “irrevocable, worldwide, non-exclusive, perpetual, fully sublicensable, transferable, free and licensed to use, reproduce, modify, adapt, publish, translate, create derivative works. from, distribute, transmit, publicly perform and publicly display such Photos … ”in promoting the application and its charities. However, they do not use your photos to advertise Johnson & Johnson products.
- Tinbox : Your facebook data as above screenshot.
- Give2Charity : Your location wherever you go as long as the app is installed.
These apps are not scams: there are indeed charities that ultimately benefit. But it’s up to you if you’re happy with what you give these companies in exchange for donating a few dollars to the charity of your choice. Personally, I’d rather give real money directly to the goals I believe in than spend a few minutes a day fiddling with a charity app that requires a lot more and only delivers a piece of the pie.
There is one more nuance. Beware of mentally classifying your interaction with the app as an actual donation to charity. Acting easily in the name of charity can actually make you less likely to donate real money than if you didn’t make it easy to act, according to a study in the European Journal of Social Psychology . So don’t be fooled into thinking that you have already donated.
Remember, this is not your money . If a sponsor gives $ 10,000 to a charity through the app, and then you also open your wallet to donate $ 25, that charity will eventually bring in $ 10,025. If you don’t have the money to spare, many charities can use volunteer work or other types of donations.
Illustration by Sam Woolley .