

New Effort Gives Tech Workers Additional Way to Donate to Charity - darrellsilver
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/04/01/new-effort-gives-tech-workers-additional-way-to-donate-to-charity/

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luckydude
I put a policy in place at my company that the company would match charitable
donations 2:1 up to $5,000 (you put in $5K and we put in another $10K). We
match 1:1 after that (though if someone went nuts we'd cap it). Predictably,
charitable donations went up.

Seems like other companies could do the same thing and now it is more of a
grass roots crowd sourced thing.

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protomyth
I see their faq says:

    
    
      Will people know how much I donate or who I donate to?
        No. That’s confidential
    

I do wonder what happens when they get hacked. Also, it would be nice if they
added American Indian College Fund to their education list
[http://www.collegefund.org](http://www.collegefund.org)

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korzun
Why would I funnel donation money via a third party who will then get a tax
write off?

Seriously?

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dcaranda
@korzun My name is Danny and I'm a co-founder of RaisedBy.Us. Thanks for your
question!

Regarding the 3rd party issue: All donation methods (RaisedBy.Us or otherwise)
involve a third party. Even when you go directly to a charity's website to
make a donation, you will use a third party payment provider. The most common
method is debit or credit card. This method actually involves multiple third
parties that all take fees (an issuing bank, a merchant bank, a settlement
bank and a network such as VISA, Mastercard, Discover, etc). This fee is
called interchange and it typically inovlves a flat fee of 30 cents per
transactions plus about 2.5% to 3% of the total value of the transaction. We
thought this was pretty expensive. Donations through RaisedBy.Us charge 0% and
no flat fee per transaction. We accomplish this by using a back-end provider
that settles transactions with charities using checks and ACH methods (which
are much cheaper the credit and debit transactions) and we charge the
companies (not the donors) to access the service.

Regarding tax write off: RaisedBy.Us does not get a tax write-off for the
donations that are processed through our program. Only the initial donor
(e.g., an employee at one of our participating companies) gets a tax write-off
for donations.

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korzun
I'm aware of processing fees, to avoid it you can simply cut a check or do a
bank transfer from your personal account when donating.

But I'm also pretty sure a non-profit can write off processing fees so it's
not really an issue.

How would the employee get tax write off if the money is send to your company
which is not registered as 501(c)?

For example if you claim a deduction on your taxes and get audited, would IRS
be cool with 'I send money to XYZ which is not a 501(c) but they send it to
actual charity, I swear'.

Offering receipt of donation to every company employee would work (I think),
but I'm not sure if you are doing that?

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dcaranda
Every employee gets a receipt of how much they donated to which charities.
Their donation also shows up in their year end paystub and W-2, both of which
can be used in their tax returns.

On fees, it's typically just the network fee (e.g., Mastercard) that gets
waived. The issuing bank, acquiring bank and the processor, still take a cut.

Bank transfers have too much friction. You wouldn't pay your corner store with
a bank transfer. You'd rather swipe a card. It's why you carry around your
bank card (which as a VISA or MC logo). You wouldn't pay for something on eBay
with a bank transfer. You'd use PayPal. An interesting point is that both
PayPal, VISA and Mastercard on the bank-end are really just a series of bank
transfers wrapped with a more refined consumer/merchant interface (card / POS
terminal).

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korzun
Gotcha, that's for clarifying it. With receipts this makes way more sense :)

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tannranger
Really like this idea, great job!

