I went to Amazon yesterday and they were encouraging this charitable donation scheme (
smile.amazon.com). I wrote to OUSA about it, but it turns out it's not a good deal.
From Robin:
I was asked by another member to look at the Amazon Smile program a few months ago. The program requires we give Amazon our bank account numbers to participate, so I didn’t accept. But I did a bunch of research on it and looked at charitable reviewers’ comments on it.
In fact, studies of this type of program show that if a charity promotes this sort of program, it actually gets less in donations because people don’t realize that this “feel good” purchasing is actually lowering the amount of donations the charity gets when people use it instead of giving directly to the charity. And Amazon doesn’t tell buyers if the charity they choose is actually in the program and will actually get a donation. They list every charity on GuideStar, and tell the buyer their charity will get the money, but that’s not true if the charity has not signed up for the program.
I also found a few other issues, such as the person buying thru Amazon does not get a charitable tax deduction, Amazon gets it. Also, the percentage that goes to the charity is extremely small, for every $1000 in purchases, the charity only gets $5, and Amazon admits in the program details that it can add the cost of the donation to the buyer’s purchase.
Plus, it’s only viable if the buyer first goes thru the Smile login and doesn’t use any re-direct pages within the Amazon system, such as looking at product reviews. So, someone intending to buy thru Amazon to benefit a charity is often re-directed away from the Smile system and their purchase doesn’t count toward a donation.