Amazon made a surprising announcement recently: as of February 20, they will be discontinuing their long-running AmazonSmile initiative. AmazonSmile allowed customers to select their own charity and then donated 0.5% of every purchase made to that charity. According to my latest update in December, Amazon sent a check to Solve ME/CFS (my selected charity on the site) for the last quarter of 2022 for $1367, and over the lifetime of the program had sent $24,159. As you can see, that's a substantial donation! However, Amazon said the program wasn't "having the impact we'd hoped."
While this is a disappointing move from the world's top online seller, there are still other ways to donate to your chosen charity while shopping (which doesn't cost you anything extra):
Goodshop or iGive have almost every online store covered between them - I always stop at iGive first before doing any online shopping. Just register on each site and choose you charity. You can also earn by using the sites to search. To show you how well this works, my iGive page currently shows that I have selected Solve ME/CFS as my cause, that I have personally earned and donated $296.31 to them, and that they have earned a total of $6583.88 from all supporters! Isn't that amazing? Over $6500 just from clicking a button before we shop online.
I'm hoping that perhaps Amazon will sign up for one of these programs, but that remains to be seen.
For a list of great ME/CFS charities and more ways to support them, check out my Giving Tuesday post from November.
Goodshop doesn’t have Solve ME/CFS or Open Medicine Foundation (which was my charity of choice on Amazon smile).
ReplyDeleteOh, no! They used to have both of them - guess I haven't checked in a while. I normally use iGive, unless a store isn't included there. Those are my 2 favorite charities, too!
ReplyDeleteThanks for the heads up.
Sue