
Amazon donates 0.5% of the price of your purchases to the charity of your choice - Reltair
https://smile.amazon.com/
======
lincolnq
This is fantastic!

To save the most lives, select Against Malaria Foundation as your charity.
It's the current top recommendation from Givewell
([http://www.givewell.org](http://www.givewell.org)), an excellent charity
evaluation organization. They focus on proven cost-effectiveness and
transparency.

AMF can save lives at a rate of $2500 or so per life saved, which vastly
outperforms most other giving opportunities, at least if you require a high
standard of evidence. Givewell's evaluation of AMF is here:
[http://www.givewell.org/international/top-
charities/AMF](http://www.givewell.org/international/top-charities/AMF)

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jessepollak
The first thing I thought when I saw this was awesome!

The second thing I thought was that I'd never remember to use it.

Just whipped up a tiny little chrome extension that will always redirect you
to smile.amazon.com when you go to Amazon. It's not well tested, so could
screw you up a bunch, but figured I'd share.

[https://github.com/jessepollak/smile](https://github.com/jessepollak/smile)

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lifeisstillgood
Errr, out of 1 million eligible 501c's how many are "controversial"? as in
political shills or fronts for religious nut jobs?

I wonder how Amazon plans to deal with the inevitable "why did you donate to a
charity supporting / opposing $ISSUE?

Edit: well kids that's what happens if you comment before coffee - a negative
take on something that has a decent potential to up the level of giving USA
wide by a huge margin. Visit givewell.org and choose your favourite.

may as well make that prime account count - let me know when the UK can join
in too.

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martinald
FWIW, I work helping the non-profit site www.thegivingmachine.co.uk. We give
2.25% of purchases tracked through our site from Amazon (plus some other
retailers).

We also have a lot of other merchants signed up.

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jared314
Previous Discussion (4 days ago):

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6643676](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6643676)

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codex
Amazon may be making _more_ profit on these purchases, rather than less--
utilizing the potent marketing skills of non-profit organizations to direct
more dollars to Amazon without Amazon having to pay higher affiliate fees. I'm
not an expert, but I think Amazon's affiliate fees can be as high as 10% of
the purchase price. 0.5% is a 20x cheaper customer acquisition cost.

~~~
stp-ip
One reason why they axed down socialvest.com and aflattr.com support and
started doing smile. Nothing new, but cheaper.

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shliachtx
There's a catch... It only works if you go to
[http://smile.amazon.com](http://smile.amazon.com), using the regular amazon
won't do anything.

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dingaling
I wouldn't expect it to be too difficult to incorporate one's own charity
these days.

A 0.5% effective rebate on everything you purchase on Amazon is better than
many bank accounts offer...

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t0
Is this forever? Why are we just hearing about this now - and from a mallard?

~~~
ars
From a mallard? A duck?

~~~
jared314
It showed up, on Reddit, 6 hours ago as a meme, using the Actual Advice
Mallard image.

[http://www.reddit.com/r/AdviceAnimals/comments/1pu5wh/a_simp...](http://www.reddit.com/r/AdviceAnimals/comments/1pu5wh/a_simple_way_to_help_the_world/)

[http://i.imgur.com/SRIGLBb.jpg](http://i.imgur.com/SRIGLBb.jpg)

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charlysisto
yup that's also the amount of taxes amazon's paying in europe

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kimonos
This is great news! Keep it up!

