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Whenever you make an old fashioned snail mail contribution to almost any charity, you get put on a list where you will receive several more requests for more money from that charity. Thank you gifts, membership renewal requests, emergency donation requests, and reminders that you haven't contributed in a while years later. Worse, many legitimate-seeming charities will sell your name on to other charities and you can get dozens. The larger the contribution the more further appeals you receive. It's just the way the fundraising business works.
This is a terrible waste of the charity's resources, the donor's time and attention, and the environment that has to be burdened with all that trash. The last one is particularly ironic in the case of environmental causes.
I believe I have a solution to this problem. Imagine there was a service you could send your donations to. You would specify what charity the donation was for, and they would collect all the donations to that charity that had come in every couple of months and send it on anonymously. The charity would pay a very small surcharge, which would be far less than what it costs them to send out all that follow-up spam.
The donor could easily set up a recurring donation, and in any case could opt in to a single annual statement listing the charities they had donated to.
The main question I have about this would be whether the tax laws would allow it. I have heard that a 501(c)3 can make donations to other 501(c)3 organizations. This would allow the donor to retain the tax benefits and make it easy to account for them with the IRS. Even if the aggregator were a 501(c)4, the current tax law means there is no benefit for most taxpayers to donate to a 501(c)3, but I suspect that if the aggregator had to operate as a regular company it wouldn't work financially.
I would be interested to have someone with more knowledge than I comment on how far this could fly legally. Ideally such a person would be a lawyer, but I'm in no position to pay a lawyer for official legal advice.
This is a terrible waste of the charity's resources, the donor's time and attention, and the environment that has to be burdened with all that trash. The last one is particularly ironic in the case of environmental causes.
I believe I have a solution to this problem. Imagine there was a service you could send your donations to. You would specify what charity the donation was for, and they would collect all the donations to that charity that had come in every couple of months and send it on anonymously. The charity would pay a very small surcharge, which would be far less than what it costs them to send out all that follow-up spam.
The donor could easily set up a recurring donation, and in any case could opt in to a single annual statement listing the charities they had donated to.
The main question I have about this would be whether the tax laws would allow it. I have heard that a 501(c)3 can make donations to other 501(c)3 organizations. This would allow the donor to retain the tax benefits and make it easy to account for them with the IRS. Even if the aggregator were a 501(c)4, the current tax law means there is no benefit for most taxpayers to donate to a 501(c)3, but I suspect that if the aggregator had to operate as a regular company it wouldn't work financially.
I would be interested to have someone with more knowledge than I comment on how far this could fly legally. Ideally such a person would be a lawyer, but I'm in no position to pay a lawyer for official legal advice.