A Dollar Here, A Dollar There…

As the saying goes, pretty soon you are talking about real money. And when you talk about real money, Amazon might come to mind, because they are a company who has figured out how to make big-time money! Estimates are that Amazon revenue will near $80 billion dollars this year. Their customer base keeps growing, with nearly 250 million people considered to be active customers, meaning that they have made a purchase within the past 12 months. I’m sure these numbers make company founder Jeff Bezos smile all of the time. And now, Amazon would like to make their customers, and your non-profit organization smile as well.

And they will do this in the easiest way possible, by giving some of those Amazon billions to charity.

Whether you are a non-profit looking for new ways to raise a little money and remind your supporters of the good work you are doing, or a person who wants to support a favorite cause, you need to know about AmazonSmile, the company’s new program that will give back to the charitable community a small percentage of money spent on qualifying products. Small is a relative word, our calculations suggest that, within a year or two, the AmazonSmile Foundation could be directing as much as half a billion dollars to U. S. based public charities annually.

The donations will represent .5% of the purchase price of a very wide selection of products. Sure, that doesn’t sound like that much, but the average Amazon customer spends about $245 a year on Amazon, which means that each customer could bring about $1.25 of donated money to your door. Do you have 1,000 supporters? That’s worth over $1,000.00. 25,000 supporters? About $30 grand a year.

If this sounds like a good idea, there are some things you need to do to take advantage of it. First, you will want to make sure that your non-profit organization is among the nearly one million groups already recognized by the AmazonSmile program. If it isn’t, you can go to the registration page and ask to be included in the future.  The process is simple and straightforward and the requirements are pretty basic as well. Please note that you will need to name an organization administrator, and provide an email address, Employer Identification Number, and a means to receive AmazonSmile donations via electronic funds transfer (basically you will need to have a bank account!).

Charitable organizations that are on the registration list already will be contacted by AmazonSmile the first time anyone chooses them, and will be asked to register with the program in order to begin receiving donations. If a group does not respond within four quarterly donation cycles, anything that had been pledged to this group will be distributed to other registered organizations, and their donors will be prompted to choose a different group.

The next step is to grow awareness of the program among your employees, your supporters, and everyone you can think of who would be in favor of shifting some of that Amazon money from their bottom line to your “special needs fund” – or whatever purpose you could find for the extra money. There are a few steps involved, so pay attention and communicate clearly.

First, shoppers should know that donations are made from purchases which come through the AmazonSmile commerce site, not the main Amazon shopping platform. This means that you have to be logged in to http://smile.amazon.com and not just http://amazon.com . The good news for the customer is that nearly every product they might be looking for is available on both sites.

Next, the individual customer needs to choose a charity which the donations will benefit. The opportunity to choose will be offered automatically the first time someone logs into the AmazonSmile site, and there is a “Change Your Charity” option available under the “Your Account” tab, so no selection has to be forever. Unless you make changes all donations from AmazonSmile that are created by a purchase will continue to go to your current choice. This means that, conveniently, a shopper doesn’t have to make a new choice each time he or she logs in.

That’s pretty much it. Once everything is set up, people make qualifying purchase, and the AmazonSmile system sends donations via EFT every 3 months. For more details of the program, see their website.

As we said at the start, it will only be a dollar here, a dollar there, but sooner or later…!