Swipegood combines shopping, rounding up and monthly giving
Howard Lake | 20 January 2011 | Blogs
San Francisco-based SwipeGood has come up with an attractive combination of rounding up purchases on credit cards, donating the difference to charity, and doing so on an ongoing, monthly basis.
Users register with the service, select the charity they like, and register their credit card. From that point onwards, until they cancel their registration, every time they make a purchase using their credit card it benefits their chosen charity since SwipeGood rounds up the sum to the nearest dollar and passes that to the charity at the end of each month.
To save credit card processing costs, SwipeGood in practice aggregates the rounded up amounts for 30 days and then charges the cards just once a month.
Frictionless fundraising, as Michael Gilbert coined the phrase. What seems particularly valuable about this rounding up service is that it is ongoing. Many other penny on or round up services function only with a particular merchant or group of merchants: SwipeGood works for any purchase on the credit card.
SwipeGood say that the average user generates $20 a month for charity. Users can of course opt to set an upper limit on the amount that goes to charity. And the sums donated are tax-deductible.
SwipeGood charges users a 5% fee to handle the monthly transaction but there are no charges to charities.
Perhaps the only downside is that you currently have to choose from a limited number of charities who can benefit.
Yes, it’s only available in the US.
www.swipegood.com
About Howard Lake
Howard Lake is consultant editor of UK Fundraising. He founded the site in 1994 and successfully sold it in 2022. As director of Giving X Ltd he is exploring growing giving on a massive scale.
He is the founder of Fundraising Camp and co-founder of GoodJobs.