Sign in to view
member only content

It makes sense that reducing the effort involved in donating to charity should increase donations overall. That’s part of the premise behind Method’s clothes-collecting laundry truck, and it’s also inherent in online donation-generators such as ProcrasDonate. Now, San Francisco-based SwipeGood aims to accomplish something similar, this time harnessing consumers’ use of credit cards. Users of SwipeGood begin by signing up with the service and selecting the charity they’d like to help. They also register the credit card they’d like to use toward that end. Once that’s done, they simply go about their normal daily routine, using the designated credit card as they normally would. The only difference is that for each purchase made using that card, SwipeGood rounds up the amount spent to the nearest dollar, donating the difference to the user’s chosen charity at the end of each month. On average, just that simple rounding up process amounts to about USD 20 per month, SwipeGood says, though users can also set an upper limit. Participation in SwipeGood is free for charities; donors pay a fee to the service of 5 percent of each monthly donation. As an interesting side note, SwipeGood’s management and advisory teams include founders of Blippy and Supercool School, both of which have appeared on our virtual pages in the past. Charitable organizations: one to get involved in! Spotted by Troy Tessalone