
Dollar a Day - irollboozers
https://dollaraday.co/
======
travisfischer
I was hoping this would be implemented as:

\- I sign up to donate at least a dollar a day.

\- There is a growing list of non-profits supported.

\- I get emails with newly added ones.

\- For each non-profit I get to choose to either:

a) add a full additional dollar a day for that organization

or

b) add the new organization to a list of organizations that split my daily
existing donation amount.

or

c) skip it.

I dislike this implementation for a number of reasons.

* From the non-profits perspective, re-occuring and emotionally invested donations are much more valuable than a one off big shot of money.

* From my perspective I will never donate to an unknown entity regardless of filtering criteria. I have limited resources and believe I can have the impact I want to have by chosen where to use those resources.

* If this system catches on I imagine it will result in many a controversy, which may just be the price dollaraday.co is willing to pay, but it sure seems like an unnecessary distraction.

~~~
bmmayer1
I have to agree. If I don't know where my money is going, I simply can't
countenance giving money to a nonprofit (or a company for that matter). I
don't know what their selection process is. The one nonprofit they show on
their site, Shelterbox, I've seen in action in the Philippines and I have a
lot of issues with how they run their operation and the efficacy of their
solution.

I've actually looked into that model. You wouldn't have to have partnerships
with nonprofits, you can just mail them checks (they are already set up to
receive donations and you don't need permission to donate!)

The wrinkle with that concept is with pass-through donations, the donor can't
claim a tax exemption unless the pass-through entity is also classified as
such. The way around it is to set up a clearinghouse with a bank that
authorizes the pass-through entity to write checks on behalf of members. Then
when you donate your $1 a day, it goes into your bank account, and checks are
written from there every month to the charities of your choice. Then you have
to figure out pricing and transaction fees with the extra overhead you're
introducing across sending payments to multiple nonprofits.

Maybe it's not a big deal with $1 a day, but if you want to scale to
supporting bigger recurring donations people are going to want a tax
exemption.

It's a good start but I think it needs to be thought out more to become a
viable product.

~~~
scotje
Do you know if there a legal/tax impediment to getting the pass-through
classified as a not-for-profit? Or did you just mean it makes it harder to
implement as a traditional startup?

~~~
briandear
The pass-through would have to set up as a foundation that then issues grants
to other non-profits. That isn't an easy process. I won't donate anything
unless there's a tax advantage. The reason is that non-profits that are
registered 501 3(c)'s have certain reporting requirements. If they aren't
registered, there's little accountability.

~~~
stonemetal
From their site:

We’re a nonprofit too! Dollar a Day makes no money, in any way, from donations
on this site. Dollar a Day was built by a team of (almost entirely)
volunteers.

~~~
briandear
Are they a 501 c3? Nope? Then no tax deduction. Calling yourself nonprofit and
actually being a non profit are not one and the same under tax law.

------
jawns
I _love_ the idea of getting a daily email that tells you about a worthy
nonprofit that you might not otherwise hear about, and this system makes it
dead-simple to make micro-donations to each charity.

However, I _hate_ the idea of donating to a black box. True, Dollar a Day
publishes its criteria for selecting nonprofits, but those criteria are highly
subjective. And, according to the FAQ, there's no way to opt out of donating
to a particular featured nonprofit that you don't want to support. Heck, even
if you cancel your monthly "subscription," your money will still go to all of
the nonprofits that are in the queue for the rest of the month.

I understand the organization's decision to make things simple to start out,
but I hope that it soon offers a way to opt out on a charity-by-charity basis
(it could be as simple as a link in the daily email), and pro-rated refunds so
that if you decide to stop donating on Day 1 of the month, you're not on the
hook for days 2-30.

~~~
aganders3
An interesting take on this would be each day having to say "nope" to the
nonprofit if you wanted to skip it. Make it an opt-out donation each morning
(or a chosen time).

You could defer all the "no" dollars into a pile so the user could add a bonus
dollar in the same way for another day.

Edit: I think you added this to your reply already! I love the idea, though.

~~~
jawns
I like your idea of being able to defer a dollar and then donate it to another
charity you like more. That way, you're still donating a fixed $30/month, but
you can distribute it more to your liking.

~~~
iLoch
I think what he was more talking about was having an invisible balance. Every
month you have $30, and if you choose to opt out of a payment one day, that
just means you'll have $31 for the next 30 days. And now that I've actually
thought about that, it doesn't make much sense - since you're only donating 1
dollar a day. Maybe you could choose to "add my credit to today's payment", or
maybe they just allow you to run your account for longer after you choose to
discontinue your subscription (but that is sort of a disincentive to continue
subscribing for people who commonly choose to skip payments.)

------
mankyd
Not saying this isn't valuable, but I believe that Google did this a year or
two ago: [https://onetoday.google.com/](https://onetoday.google.com/)

What's the differentiation?

~~~
timdierks
Google has a bunch of non-profits, and you are suggested one each day, and can
choose to donate to it (or any other). It doesn't pool all One Today users
into a single donation recipient per day, and there's no pre-commitment.

Dollar a Day looks great, but it basically boils down to you donating to a
non-profit that grants to other non-profits and sends you a daily report: they
direct the funds and curate the recipients.

One Today also has a nice challenge-match feature.

------
cbr
This approach would make sense if most charities were similar in how much
better they could make the world with your dollar. But instead there are huge
differences! For example, if we look just at developing world health we see a
power law distribution, where a few interventions are much better than the
rest. [1] Instead of signing up to give small amounts to lots of different
organizations, it's much better to find one working on one of these best
approaches (givewell.org is helpful here) and fund that more.

[1] [http://www.jefftk.com/daly-per-1000-usd.png](http://www.jefftk.com/daly-
per-1000-usd.png)

~~~
cowsandmilk
a chart with no labels on the axes communicates almost nothing

~~~
cbr
Sorry! I forgot that the axes were in the surrounding page not in the image.

Vertical is "$/DALY" which is basically the cost-benefit ratio of a medical
treatment. $100/DALY would mean $100 to give someone an additional healthy
year of life. The horizontal axis is a wide range of developing world medical
interventions, lined up from worst cost-per-daly to best. You can see that the
very best ones are much better than most of them, though even the "worst" ones
are still excellent value for the money both in absolute terms and compared to
what additional health spending gets you in rich countries.

------
ryana
As someone who has spent a lot of time in the non-profit and B-Corp space, I'm
very interested to see how this plays out. It's an interesting idea and one
that can definitely have a lot of value if it resonates with donors.

However, I do worry about that last point. One of the most important part of
NPO fundraising is around building a relationship with the donor. Dollar a Day
seems to take that piece out of the fundraising process, for better or worse.

Best case, outsourcing your donor outreach to Dollar a Day opens you up to
thousands of new donors who get to learn more about you.

Worst case, it's Groupon for non-profit donations; taking away your ability to
market your brand and spamming you into a few million inboxes who will likely
unsubscribe after a 3-6 months of daily emails.

------
picardo
Isn't this essentially the same thing as One Today?

[https://onetoday.google.com/](https://onetoday.google.com/)

~~~
hardwaresofton
Yes, but that's no reason to not pursue it, right?

I personally like non-google options, and competition is a generally a good
thing

~~~
joeteplow
Especially competition in facilitating charitable donations!

------
whyenot
Really nice concept

I _DO_ wish you would display this information a little more prominently
instead of burying it in the FAQ. There are many companies that fundraise for
non-profits that take a cut of donations and are _not_ nonprofit themselves.
You aren't doing this. Good!

Q: Is Dollar a Day a nonprofit?

A: Yes, we’re a nonprofit too! Dollar a Day was built by a team of (almost
entirely) volunteers, and our minimal expenses are covered by a few direct
donations. Dollar a Day makes no money, in any way, from donations on this
site.

------
po
Keeping you anonymous to the charity to preventing them from spamming you with
mail is maybe the best part of this pitch. Even well run charities send a
tremendous amount of mail after you give a donation. It's one of the big
turnoffs I have about the whole donation process.

~~~
TeMPOraL
Welcome to the world of marketing. They can do stuff that sucks hard, because
apparently doing it brings more money that not doing it. Remember, they care
about your money, not about your feelings.

------
exacube
I hate the whole credit processing fee bit -- Why are 2+% of all donations
going towards VISA? There should be a direct deposit through your bank card or
something!

~~~
IkmoIkmo
They actually use a payment processor and the full charge is 4%.

It states they also disburse the donations, which may actually end up being a
rather good deal. That is, collecting money via creditcard AND getting that
money to a local NGO in Mali is not going to be cheap.

But regardless, 4% does sound like a lot, especially if they disburse to e.g.
US based organisations that work abroad.

If the bitcoin ecosystem matures it'd be able to help a huge deal in this
regard. Circle just launched offering free and instant purchase using bank or
credit, and Bitpay offers 0% payment processing in 33 countries.

Anyway, I hope people consider checking out the give well foundation. Giving
well is extremely important, and I'm concerned that getting a daily email with
some organisations, without any data, analysis etc, we'll be giving very
ineffectively to the guys with the most magical story, and perhaps, to the
guys with the most money spent on marketing vs aid. Now I definitely am of the
opinion that this is okay (great Ted talk on this), BUT if you could spend
better, I'd encourage that.

The best example for me was this. Millions of people worldwide are blind due
to cataracts, often due to malnutrition. You can largely and often completely
'cure' these people from their blindness with a cheap $20 operation that
commonly happens in countries like India. Alternatively, you have blind people
who can't be cured, often born blind. We can improve their quality of life,
but in say the US it'd cost $20k to completely raise, nurture and train a
guide dog.

So we have a choice to either cure someone's blindness completely, or
literally spend three orders of magnitude (1000x) more to improve a blind
person's life.

As you can imagine, getting one million donors to drop $20 would be a hugely
successful campaign. But if they all spent it on guide dogs, it'd have much
less of an impact of merely 1000 people donating $20 to completely cure the
blindness of a similar number of people.

That's why giving well is so important. I fear apps and services like these
diminish that. I hope we all appreciate our influence and act accordingly by
carefully considering who to give your money to.

~~~
icebraining
The 4% also shocked me, since even PayPal has much better fees. There's a
couple of posts on GiveWell about that payment processor (Network for Good):

[http://blog.givewell.org/2007/02/10/network-for-what-
now/](http://blog.givewell.org/2007/02/10/network-for-what-now/)

[http://blog.givewell.org/2007/02/17/quick-
update/](http://blog.givewell.org/2007/02/17/quick-update/)

~~~
IkmoIkmo
Thanks for posting that. I still wonder though whether NFG is able to deliver
money to charities abroad, included with that 4%.

For example, an average remittance payment is about 9.3%. In some places it's
14%, because the financial infrastructure to get payments to some of the
remote places on earth is really, really tricky. So if that's all included in
the fee, it's a bargain.

If not (and it's just pure payment processing without subsequent delivery
outside the US) it's really terrible. Paypal, Google, Stripe, they all beat
it. Especially as there's often deals for non-profits, e.g. Bitpay/Coinbase
will process charitable donations for free. Kiva's creditcard fees for example
are waived if I remember correctly.

------
Goopplesoft
This is very similar to a feature I love about Watsi:
[https://watsi.org/monthly](https://watsi.org/monthly)

------
mertd
Once or twice a year, I go to
[http://www.charitynavigator.org/](http://www.charitynavigator.org/) to do my
own research and donate to a charity that I think will make good use of the
money.

Lump sum method has two advantages:

1) Easier to keep track of for tax filing.

2) Your employer might have a donation match program. Again it is easier to
file a form and tell them to make a matching donation.

------
Duhveed
Personally, I'd want an opt-out too...I don't mind a default of charitable,
but for me to be on board, it'd be essential to be able to disable my
contribution should I find the organization uncharitable.

More than that though, I think it'd be neat if this group hooked up with
giv2giv.org and each day/dollar would create a new, well-funded endowment. And
maybe give users a way to vote for their favorite reruns or something so
there'd be a bit of a feedback loop.

Anyway, congrats to them for a basically good idea. I agree that there are
some refinements that would make it a bit more palatable for me personally,
but I dig it. I love innovation in this space.

------
cophelan
I created a non-profit with a similar concept about 5 years ago called
Vonate.org (now defunct). Our concept was $1/month and you would vote/donate
(vonate) your dollar to one of the two featured organizations. I'm a big
believer in the micro donation space, but execution is key.

My biggest lessons learned were:

1) Find and vetting 24 great organizations was difficult. 2) Getting people to
spend $15/year (how we covered costs) was a challenge, so keep your
expectations on audience engagement incredibly low. 3) Revenue through
sponsorships won't keep the lights on.

Regardless - best of luck.

------
kolev
How is this any different than Google One Today
([https://onetoday.google.com/](https://onetoday.google.com/))? At least with
Google, I trust them with money, plus, the app has a lot more than just $1/day
if you really care about a cause. It has the game mechanics, too, so, I'm
sorry, but I'm sticking with Google.

------
grimtrigger
This is an awesome idea. I like the idea of waking up and getting an email
"this is who you helped without even knowing it!".

The detractors are missing two important points:

1) People like being part of a larger movement.

2) People like knowing their donation as impact. I would rather be part of a
team donating $1,000 then just donating $1.

I signed up for the free email, but if I like what I see I'll be joining.

------
vacri
_" all donations are 100% US tax-deductible."_

The tax-deductability of charitable donations has always sat weirdly with me.
It's not exactly charitable if you're not actually sacrificing anything; it's
more a rearrangement of your tax allocation. That can be a good thing in and
of itself, but if you're going to claim donations on tax, it's not really
something you should get a warm, fuzzy feeling for (in my opinion). I have a
regular payment to MSF happening every month, and it doesn't really sit right
with me that I can claim it on tax (and I don't).

On the other hand, this is a good argument against the libertarian dot-point
that private charity 'would happen if we weren't taxed so much'. Given that
you can offset your tax by your charitable donations, it becomes a zero-sum
game, so why aren't people currently donating at the levels libertarians say
they _theoretically_ would? In the US, you can deduct up to half your gross
income from tax, and given that the tax load is less than 50%, you can at
least convert your income tax to charitable donations, and then start this
theoretical "extra charity" that would apparently spring into action.

~~~
lotharbot
> _" It's not exactly charitable if you're not actually sacrificing anything"_

Tax-deductible doesn't mean that the money comes straight out of taxes, it
means that you don't pay taxes on the donation. So you give $1.00 to get out
of your marginal rate, something like $0.28 or $0.35, in taxes.

In order to eliminate your entire tax burden (per your libertarian comment),
you would have to donate considerably more than you pay in taxes. You'd have
to donate everything you made above the 0% tax bracket (getting down to a net
income of about $15,700 for a married couple.) There are actually people who
do it -- pacifists who refuse to pay taxes that could fund wars, for example
[0]. But even then it's only possible if your income starts low enough.

[0]
[http://www.nwtrcc.org/practical5.php](http://www.nwtrcc.org/practical5.php)

~~~
vacri
Ah, yes, my misreading of the IRS article [1]. It's still meaning that you're
paying less tax, should you want to give to charity.

[1] [http://www.irs.gov/Charities-&-Non-Profits/Charitable-
Organi...](http://www.irs.gov/Charities-&-Non-Profits/Charitable-
Organizations/Charitable-Contribution-Deductions)

------
shbhrsaha
Check out [http://goodst.org/](http://goodst.org/) to pay $0.25/day

~~~
gergles
Plus $2.50 a month of overhead.

------
EGreg
They should run it like a city or country. Not everyone can be bothered to
find these nonprofits. The community should be able to nominate nonprofits and
and vote on which one gets the funding every day. Then they'll have to worry
about sybil attacks, though.

Usually the way to avoid voting attacks is to take the hotornot approach and
only present random startups for rating by users. But that doesn't prevent
sybil attacks - in order to prevent those you need signup to be expensive. How
do you do that? Requiring text to a mobile number used to work until Google
Voice. Now what?

------
zemaj
It would be great if the daily email included the amount being sent to today's
charity. It would be a nice feeling to see this number go up over time.

------
antaviana
It seems a good idea that can also be applied to open source projects who ask
for donations. You could donate just to support the concept of open source.

------
joshdance
I was hoping this would be: here is a non-profit for the day. Do you want to
a.) donate one dollar, or b.) donate x amount every day.

------
alexbecker
Surely this is less effective than finding a few excellent charities and
giving them a large sum.

------
kyro
I think this idea is great and have no issues with the way they've structured
it.

------
nosage
Neat but your brand can be confused with: dollaraday.com, which I wonder what
it is.

------
monkmartinez
The NFL is 501(c)...

------
menzoic
why aren't there any share tools on this site?

------
Dewie
My attitude towards charity is kind of the opposite. If I am to donate to
charity, I want to concentrate on one or a few things, so that I'm able to
actually research them and see for myself whether I think that the money will
come to good use.

This kind of thing is different from people going door to door, collecting
money; instead of someone actively going to _you_ in order to convince you to
give to some "good" (according to them) cause, _you_ are the active
participant. There isn't much immediate social guilt of having to say "no", in
this case. People who collect for charities in the usual, door to door or
through other means of confronting people probably want to play on people's
feeling of social dignity and that they don't want to appear to be stingy. So
then the average person ends up giving to a lot of different charities -
because they all ask for a little at a time - and knowing little about each
one.

But why would I _deliberately_ want to diversify my charity, if _I 'm_ the one
who is actively subscribing to it? Isn't it better to research a few good
ones, and actively pursue those? Why give up that choice to some other entity,
and make it practically impossible for me to keep up with all the different
causes (you can't and won't feel motivated to research where every dollar you
give goes to, when it all goes to different things). Another user here has it
right - it's a black box. And apparently for no good reason.

------
wbandxx
I must ask this question and someone please enlighten me but -- 1\. Where does
money come from to support these Organization ( e.g. dollaraday or Watsi ?

2\. How do these Organizations pay for developer costs , website, office
maintenance and employee salary ?

Do they take cut from donation and donate rest of the money ? If that's the
case then its pretty much scam.

Susan Komen for women's breast cancer collect millions of dollar. Innocent
people pay thinking money is going to cancer research. But they instead pay
their CEO some $500k+ salary. What a shame !

I must ask this is starting a non-profit new legal scam in United States to
collect money ?

~~~
nedwin
Firstly the people running this are already incredibly wealthy by themselves.
They more than likely funded the startup costs themselves, or through wealthy
benefactors.

They pay operational expenses from a percentage of the money they raise.

Just because they pay operational expenses doesn't make them a scam - that's
how any non-profit operates.

The best non-profits contribute the greatest percentage of their revenue to
helping people. I believe this is the case here.

Do you want the best person running a company like this? Or would you prefer
the cheapest person running a company like this?

