Posted July 7th, 2015
By Kris Powers
It's important to think good, speak good, and do good. If we want to see positive change in the world, then we need to connect to goodness. Shari Arison
From donating your time, money or gently used household items to various charities and organizations, to giving blood and plasma through the American Red Cross, there are many great ways to give. “Doing good” benefits your long-term health and happiness while helping others – a win-win situation if we’ve ever heard of one!
We’ve scouted out a few suggestions that make it easier to contribute to great causes, right from your laptop. We’d love to hear your favorites as well!
iGive There are plenty of portals where you can start your online shopping, but iGive gives a percentage of your purchase at over 1,000 stores to the charity of your choice (an average of 3% donated). A browser add-on automatically activates iGive when you're at a participating store and also shows you coupons and offers for the store. The site boasts that with 350,000+ shoppers since 1997, $7 million has been sent to 35,000+ causes.
Google’s One Today You can also use Google's One Today app on Android or iOS whenever you're feeling generous and give just $1 to the charity of the day.
Kiva enables you to give a loan (as little as $25) to a small business in developing countries. The site allows you to read through hundreds of borrower stories of people looking for loans to grow businesses, go to school, switch to clean energy and more. Once you make the decision to give a loan, you'll get progress reports on the project. While there is a risk you won't get repaid, 98% of Kiva loans have been repaid. When borrowers repay, you can use that money to empower another person by supporting a new loan, choose to donate the money to Kiva or withdraw it.
AmazonSmile If you're going to shop at Amazon anyway, why not have part of your purchase automatically go to charity? That's what Amazon's program AmazonSmile does. Just head to the site every time you shop Amazon and it's just like shopping on Amazon, except better—0.5% of your purchase goes to the charity of your choice.
Goodsearch is an online shopping mall that donates a percent of your purchase price to your cause when you shop at one of 3,000+ partner stores including top retailers like Amazon (1.5% donation), Expedia (up to 5% donation), and Staples (2.5% donation). You can also find 25,000+ active discounts and money-saving coupons so you can save money and give back at the same time! The site reports $11,810,028 raised for causes so far!
Survey Monkey has a member site where people can sign up to take surveys for charities. Once you sign up and complete your profile, you will get invited to take surveys and every time you finish a survey, $0.50 gets donated to whichever charity you pick from the list of charity partners.
(Ed4Career has not received any compensation for mentioning any of the above charities or organizations in this blog and is not affiliated with any of the charities or organizations with the exception that we do proudly support Kiva as part of our Corporate Social Responsibility program. It is up to the discretion of any individual and/or organization to determine if any of the above-mentioned websites are of interest or use).
