[This is a guest post by Courtney Danforth, who teaches English at the College of Southern Nevada and tweets as @csdanforth. Courtney previously wrote "Disaster Planning and the Academic Career" for ProfHacker.--@jbj]
You probably already give to charity. Maybe you do Race for the Cure every year, or are a member of your public radio station, or donate blood, or are a scout leader, or make a traditional tithe, or take a shift at the homeless shelter. You could probably give more–most of us could. But this post is about more than charity, because just as ProfHacker does more and does it better with the resources we’ve got, philanthropy is doing more with charity. Charity is about giving (your money, your time, your stuff); philanthropy is about sharing your charitable interests and gathering support for them. What follows are tips and tools for doing more with your giving.
Give Your Money
On giving to charity, “How much do you have to give? What’s the total amount?”, asks Albert Brooks in Defending Your Life (1991). There’s no easy answer, but you could do worse than to follow the ancient practice of tithing–budgeting 10% (of income and/or time) to give to others. Whatever amount you have to give, it will be appreciated and put to good use if you take care in selecting a recipient. Here are some tools for choosing well:
Charity Navigator evaluates charities for organizational efficiency and capacity and lists data gathered from tax forms of charities so that donors can make smart, informed decisions for how best to give money. Profiles include information such as ratio of funds spent on programming vs. administration vs. fundraising, CEO salary, and organizations with related missions.
With FirstGiving, users create individual fundraising pages within the system and encourage others to support the cause and the charity by promoting the page through popular networks. However you use it, you can set up the service to email you (the fundraiser) every time someone donates through your page and use an auto-reply to thank the donor for supporting your cause and to provide any other information you want to share.
Similar to FirstGiving, JustGive is a fundraising service and a tracking service for your giving history. Additionally, Justgive includes charity-discovery and tools to plan your giving.
Bring Light is a for-profit company. Charities pay a service fee for using the service plus a percentage of each donation. You can insure that more of your gift reaches the programs you want to support by giving directly to the charity, but Bring Light and similar companies aren’t all bad since they function as clearinghouse for organizations and offer tracking tools to donors.
Like Bring Light, Xperedon deducts a portion (5%) of donations as fees (and also tax, for Swiss charities). This service operates on a portfolio model; users set up a roster of charities they wish to support, then donate monthly, and Xperedon allocates the monthly gift according to the portfolio. With CardLink, you link your debit or credit card to your Xperedon account and associate your donations to your spending. So, if 30% of your monthly spending goes to restaurants and groceries, then 30% of your charitable gift for that month will be assigned to food- or hunger- related charities. And if 10% of your bill is for hotels, then 10% of your designated monthly charitable gift will go to organizations addressing homelessness. This seems a good way to be more thoughtful about your own spending in relation to world issues.
Kiva is a microfinance program with the goal of alleviating worldwide poverty. It is not exactly a “charity”, in the tax sense of the word; what it gives away is low-interest microloans to help people (81.42% women) start businesses. According to Kiva, safe, affordable access to capital is a key to overcoming poverty.
Kickstarter, like Kiva, is not exactly a charitable organization in the tax sense of the word. Some of the projects in Kickstarter are proposed by charitable organizations, but it is not a function fundamental to the tool/system. Kickstarter manages projects and microinvestors to support creative projects (for example, 1100 other sponsors and I recently funded the “Replacing the ‘N-word’ with ‘Robot’ in Huck Finn” project).
DonorsChoose, operating not unlike Kiva or Kickstarter, is a clear charity because donors do not get their funds returned. Individual small donors browse project proposals, select one that appeals or that has a good chance of succeeding, and donates directly to that project. Once the donation ask has been met and the project carried out, DonorsChoose posts photos or other evidence of the project’s “success” for donors to view. DonorsChoose projects are limited to public K-12 teachers.
Give Your Time
I find that planning a donation of time or skill much more challenging to manage than giving money. My best experiences have been when I made a weekly time commitment to a single organization/activity for a year at a time. I have also tried a “volunteer vacation,” living and working on-site with an organization for a week, which made for an very satisfying Spring Break.
Those of us without specific summer commitments might even consider a longer volunteer vacation. If you need to stay close to home, maybe you and a campus group can build a Habitat for Humanity house in the parking lot during Winter Term? VolunteerGuide offers a directory of vacation opportunities as exotic as building hiking trails in Iceland and restoring coral reefs in the Caribbean. To google other opportunities, you might also use the search term, “voluntourism.” All or some of your travel and other expenses may be tax deductible for such trips–check with the organization and tax professionals.
Idealist is a clearinghouse for matching volunteers, organizations, and resources. Of all the available services I’ve seen, Idealist’s database offers the most granular advanced search.
Nabuur is a service to link online volunteers to communities in need. It operates something like a Mechanical Turk (see George’s ProfHacker posts on the reliability and ethics of Mechanical Turk) of volunteering; some of the jobs currently listed include designing a form for an orphanage, writing a grant application to support a medical clinic, and soliciting donation of educational materials for a school. As rewarding as it can be to volunteer for non-skilled tasks, many Prof. Hacker readers have spent years honing skills like grant-writing that can be put to exceptionally good use via Nabuur. Additionally, Nabuur may be the opportunity you need to start a service learning project in your classroom.
To volunteer your time in person, VolunteerMatch lists opportunities with 76,000 nonprofits throughout the United States. Originally place-based, VolunteerMatch now includes some virtual opportunities also, though without the intimate or ongoing relationship model of Nabuur. Because VolunteerMatch has national listings and includes one-off and disaster-related options in addition to ongoing volunteer relationships, this service (and its iPhone app) is useful for kickstarting your volunteering while traveling (to conferences, to family, etc.) and relocating or just checking out what’s available in your area.
OneBrick is a calender service connecting short-term volunteers and like-minded people with events and socializing. This could be a good way to meet people and get involved when you relocate!
Give Your Stuff
I keep a box in my coat closet and paper/pencil taped to the inside of the door so I can throw stuff in whenever I decide to clear out household items or clothing appropriate for a thrift store or shelter. When the box is full, it goes in the car to be dropped off and the paper is to keep a running list for tax season. Do take care that items you donate are clean and functional–otherwise your good deed is likely to cause more work and expense for the charity.
Vietnam Veterans does a nice job of collecting important donation information and allows you to schedule a pickup at your house.
Goodwill has stores and donation boxes throughout the US. You can find a drop-off location here.
DonationTown will help you find a local charity to pick up your donations.
Dress for Success collects used business clothing to help disadvantaged women dress appropriately for job interviews. CareerGear dresses men.
Recycles.org will place your used electronics or office gear with needy organizations.
If you’re not in it for the tax deduction, you are very likely to find someone on Freecycle who can put your discards to good use. After joining a local group, you can list available items, then make arrangements with recipients to make a transfer. In my experience, most takers have been happy to pick up something I leave for them on the porch.
Get a Plan
It feels good to give whenever someone asks, buying Girl Scout cookies from a colleague’s kid or giving five bucks to the homeless guy on the corner or filling in at the first aid station for a 5K. If, however, you develop (and follow) a plan for charitable giving (stating goals, deadlines, and evaluation criteria), you’re more likely both to get and feel more accomplished. Here are some ideas:
- Choose a single organization to support all year. Make a large donation or a regular commitment of time. Host a fundraiser or promote the agency’s programs among friends/family/colleagues.
- Choose an issue to support for the year. Select a variety of organizations working on that issue (one for each month, one for each paycheck, etc.) and split your annual gift amount among those organizations, given periodically throughout the year. Share information about the issue and each organization with your networks each time you give (via blog, email, phone call, dinner party, tweet…).
- For each month in the year, select an organization working on an issue of special meaning during that month (e.g. in November, support an organization working on hunger) and promote that cause or organization among the people in your life.
- Examine your spending during the last month or year (many credit cards now provide a “category summary” of your spending during a month and finance services like Mint tag transactions with spending categories). Choose a charity related to each of your top three spending categories (e.g. if you spent the greatest percentages on books, restaurants, and a dog treats, find charities that support literacy, sustainable farming, and animals) then spread your gift among those three.
Whichever plan you follow, remember to plan also for emergency gifts. This year, many of us will have made a donation related to the March disaster in Japan. Last year, we supported organizations confronting the flooding in Pakistan or the earthquake in Haiti. It’s difficult to plan a gift of time for a disaster situation, but we can plan to set aside an extra monthly monetary gift or two each year (or the equivalent) to have that money available should we wish to donate after a disaster. And, if you are able to donate time or skill during such an event, that is wonderful also.
Get Help
As I have defined it here, philanthropy is charity PLUS encouraging others to support the cause. Think about the networks you already use and whether they can be deployed for philanthropy. Send a tweet every when you give to an organization. Post a link to Facebook. Share a news article on your office door. Bring up your cause at a dinner party. Presumably, the people in your networks have priorities and interests in common with you and (without pushing too hard), these people may be willing to join your cause by giving or by passing along your message. Both are valuable.
In the comments, tell us what causes you support and encourage fellow readers to join you in support. What are your favourite charitable organizations or projects? Why do you support them? How can we help?
Photo by Flickr user Howard Lake / Creative Commons Licensed
Follow Profhacker through your favorite RSS reader: 
