10 ms·

Dollar a Day

377 points by irollboozers 12y ago

menzoic 12y ago
why aren't there any share tools on this site?
whyenot 12y ago
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.
mankyd 12y ago
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?
- ISL 12y ago
  Haven't used the Google app, but it looks like Google may present you with an opportunity to donate once a day, whereas this plan donates by default?
- hgsigala 12y ago
  I use this EVERY DAY. I get a notification at 9:30am (you can set your own time) telling me about a new organization. I donate about$1 a week and about every other week I will search for tech organizations (example: Helping bolivians connect to the internet) and do a "match" donation of $5. It is great. The notifications display perfectly on my moto 360 too!
- IneffablePigeon 12y ago
  That one appears to not work in the UK, for some reason. Unfortunate. Anyone know any alternatives I could use that let me choose which charities I donate to?
- timdierks 12y ago
  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.
- TeMPOraL 12y ago
  Since it's the first time ever I saw this thing, apparently Google failed at visibility this time. So there's the differentiation.
- dasboth 12y ago
  This looks much more like how I imagined this kind of service to work. Thanks for sharing, shame it's apparently incompatible on my Android device :(
jawns 12y ago
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 12y ago
  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 12y ago
    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 12y ago
      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.)
Goopplesoft 12y ago
This is very similar to a feature I love about Watsi: https://watsi.org/monthly https://watsi.org/monthly
exacube 12y ago
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 12y ago
  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 12y ago
picardo 12y ago
Isn't this essentially the same thing as One Today? https://onetoday.google.com/ https://onetoday.google.com/
- hardwaresofton 12y ago
  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 12y ago
    Especially competition in facilitating charitable donations!
Dewie 12y ago
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.
travisfischer 12y ago
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.
- wmeredith 12y ago
  I was hoping the same thing :(
- bmmayer1 12y ago
  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 $1 a day, but if you want to scale to supporting bigger recurring donations people are going to want a tax exemption. It's a good start but I think it needs to be thought out more to become a viable product.
cbr 12y ago
This approach would make sense if most charities were similar in how much better they could make the world with your dollar. But instead there are huge differences! For example, if we look just at developing world health we see a power law distribution, where a few interventions are much better than the rest. [1] Instead of signing up to give small amounts to lots of different organizations, it's much better to find one working on one of these best approaches (givewell.org is helpful here) and fund that more. [1] http://www.jefftk.com/daly-per-1000-usd.png http://www.jefftk.com/daly-per-1000-usd.png
- cowsandmilk 12y ago
  a chart with no labels on the axes communicates almost nothing
  - cbr 12y ago
    Sorry! I forgot that the axes were in the surrounding page not in the image. Vertical is "$/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 12y ago
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.
EGreg 12y ago
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?
grimtrigger 12y ago
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.
kyro 12y ago
I think this idea is great and have no issues with the way they've structured it.
nosage 12y ago
Neat but your brand can be confused with: dollaraday.com, which I wonder what it is.
joshdance 12y ago
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.
kolev 12y ago
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.
cophelan 12y ago
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.
alexbecker 12y ago
Surely this is less effective than finding a few excellent charities and giving them a large sum.
antaviana 12y ago
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.
Duhveed 12y ago
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.
zemaj 12y ago
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.
po 12y ago
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 12y ago
  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.
vacri 12y ago
"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.
- TeMPOraL 12y ago
  > 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 (...). From what can I tell, the game theory itself is essentially one big argument about libertarian ideas.
- lotharbot 12y ago
  > "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
shbhrsaha 12y ago
Check out http://goodst.org/ http://goodst.org/ to pay $0.25/day
- gergles 12y ago
  Plus $2.50 a month of overhead.
wbandxx 12y ago
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 12y ago
  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?
mertd 12y ago
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.
monkmartinez 12y ago
The NFL is 501(c)...

377 points by irollboozers 12y ago

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

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.

mankyd 12y ago

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?

ISL 12y ago
Haven't used the Google app, but it looks like Google may present you with an opportunity to donate once a day, whereas this plan donates by default?
hgsigala 12y ago
I use this EVERY DAY. I get a notification at 9:30am (you can set your own time) telling me about a new organization. I donate about$1 a week and about every other week I will search for tech organizations (example: Helping bolivians connect to the internet) and do a "match" donation of $5. It is great. The notifications display perfectly on my moto 360 too!
IneffablePigeon 12y ago
That one appears to not work in the UK, for some reason. Unfortunate. Anyone know any alternatives I could use that let me choose which charities I donate to?
timdierks 12y ago
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.
TeMPOraL 12y ago
Since it's the first time ever I saw this thing, apparently Google failed at visibility this time. So there's the differentiation.
dasboth 12y ago
This looks much more like how I imagined this kind of service to work. Thanks for sharing, shame it's apparently incompatible on my Android device :(

jawns 12y ago

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 12y ago
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 12y ago
  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 12y ago
    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.)

Goopplesoft 12y ago

This is very similar to a feature I love about Watsi: https://watsi.org/monthly https://watsi.org/monthly

exacube 12y ago

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 12y ago
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 12y ago

picardo 12y ago

Isn't this essentially the same thing as One Today? https://onetoday.google.com/ https://onetoday.google.com/

hardwaresofton 12y ago
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 12y ago
  Especially competition in facilitating charitable donations!

Dewie 12y ago

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.

travisfischer 12y ago

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.

wmeredith 12y ago
I was hoping the same thing :(
bmmayer1 12y ago
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.

cbr 12y ago

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 12y ago
a chart with no labels on the axes communicates almost nothing
- cbr 12y ago
  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 12y ago

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.

EGreg 12y ago

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?

grimtrigger 12y ago

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.

kyro 12y ago

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

nosage 12y ago

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

joshdance 12y ago

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.

kolev 12y ago

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.

cophelan 12y ago

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.

alexbecker 12y ago

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

antaviana 12y ago

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.

Duhveed 12y ago

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.

zemaj 12y ago

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.

po 12y ago

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 12y ago
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.

vacri 12y ago

"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.

TeMPOraL 12y ago
> 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 (...). From what can I tell, the game theory itself is essentially one big argument about libertarian ideas.
lotharbot 12y ago
> "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

shbhrsaha 12y ago

Check out http://goodst.org/ http://goodst.org/ to pay $0.25/day

gergles 12y ago
Plus $2.50 a month of overhead.

wbandxx 12y ago

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 12y ago
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?

mertd 12y ago

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.

monkmartinez 12y ago

The NFL is 501(c)...