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By
Tom Mainelli
PCWorld.com
Thursday, December 21, 2000
Tired of buying silly last-minute gifts for people who have everything?
Give an alternative gift: Make an online contribution to their
favorite charity.
A
new Web site called Justgive.org can help. It makes the donation
and even sends an electronic greeting card notifying the person
that a contribution was made in their name, says Kendall Web [sic],
founder of the nonprofit site.
"It's
unique and meaningful, and it won't end up in the attic," she
says.
And
Justgive.org isn't just for gifts. Web hopes that holiday gift-givers
will use the site to make any donations.
Justgive.org
isn't the first site to accept and transfer donations to charities
online, but it's one of the few that moves your entire donation
directly to the named charity, Web says. It doesn't deduct overhead
charges, transfer fees, or credit card fees from the donation,
she says.
The
site operates through corporate sponsorships and donations. Since
its launch in October, corporations have donated nearly $1.5 million,
Web says. Companies also donate resources to keep the site staffed
and running, while individual businesses pay to sponsor areas
of the site, she says.
Making
a donation is as simple as making an online purchase. You choose
your charity, pick an amount, add it to your basket, and then
check out using a credit card.
Ensuring
Informed Giving
In
addition to trying to make online donations easier, the site is
designed to educate people, Web says. Justgive.org offers facts
and figures about giving, and calculators to help you decide how
much to donate.
Once
you've decided on figures, choosing the recipient can be even
more confusing. To help, the site offers information on the 640,000
charitable organizations in the United States on file with the
Internal Revenue Service, Web says.
If that sounds like a few too many organizations to sift through,
Justgive.org has a guide that cuts the list down to 2000 charities.
Staffers created the Justgive.org Guide by examining the financial
records of the charities, she says. They also considered whether
the charity is national in scope and recognition.
Web,
who does not take a salary for her chief executive officer position
at the organization, wants to encourage you to funnel all your
donations through Justgive.org. The site will securely store (and
password-protect) records of all your donations, which can be
very handy at tax time.
But if you'd rather check out other all-in-one charity sites,
or the Web sites of individual charities, you should follow some
basic rules of engagement, according to Angelika Geiger, the chief
operating officer of Entango, a for-profit company that designs
online-donation technologies for charities.
Tips
for Careful Contributions
Geiger
offers this checklist to help you ensure that your hard-earned
contribution is securely and accurately transmitted online.
- Verify
that the organization is a charity.
"A dot org [domain extension] doesn't necessarily mean they
are a legitimate charity," Geiger says. Before you donate,
check with sites such as the Better Business Bureau Online,
the National Charities Information Bureau, or the American
Institute of Philanthropy to find out more about an organization.
Also watch out for sites with names that sound similar to
those of national organizations.
- Check
out a site's privacy policy.
"See how they plan to use your name," Geiger says. Some will
sell the list of names they collect. A lack of a privacy policy
may be a sign, she says, or you can call and ask.
- Verify
security is in place.
"Use commonsense precautions," she says. It's the same as
making an online purchase, so be sure the site has a URL that
includes "https" to indicate it's secure, shows a padlock
in your browser's status bar, or displays a Verisign logo
before you enter your credit card information.
- If
it's a shopping site that pledges a portion to charity, find
out the specific portion.
Most of these sites are legitimate, but some pass very little
along to the charity, Geiger says. Most charities would rather
you make a donation directly rather than paying an inflated
price of which they get a small portion, she says.
Fraud
isn't a large issue with online donations yet, Geiger says. The
fact is, most charities are just trying to capitalize on the Internet's
capability to efficiently bring in contributions, she says. However,
not all charities are technology savvy, so it's up to you to protect
yourself when you make a donation online.
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