Credit Cards for Giving

Another practical benefit is that it allows you to make small donations to tens of nonprofits without fearing you'll be drowning later in fundraising letters, by virtue of not passing your home address along.

- Super easy donation process - log in, search for the nonprofit you want to give to, click a couple buttons and you're done. Even lower friction than going to the nonprofit's website and entering credit card info.

- If you don't already itemize your tax deductions every year, you can "bunch" several years of charitable giving into one year by contributing in advance for future years. For example, if you plan to donate $5k per year, you can contribute $15k to your DAF this year, but grant $5k out of the fund each year. You can itemize the contribution in the first year, while taking the standard deduction in the 2nd and 3rd years.

- Fewer things to track and list when you do your taxes. You only need to report your contributions into the DAF (often 1 or fewer per year), so you no longer have to scour your records and record each individual charitable donation you made.

[not an accountant nor a lawyer, not tax or investing advice]

Vanguard, Schwab, and Fidelity all have low-cost DAF options that you can set up online in a couple minutes. Annual fees, minimum contributions, and minimum grants vary by provider so it's worth doing a little bit of research.

Less of an advantage with the new tax law, since so many people would still fall under the standard deduction.

wait, facebook does something to help me maintain my privacy? i hate giving some place $25 and then getting monthly mail for the next 10 years.

I can recognise, from the links in this blog and other posts on the same blog like [1], that the author is giving a double-digit percentage of their income to charity. Maybe as much as 50%.

A person earning $100,000 and giving $50,000 to charity who paid a 2.9% card fee would be giving $1450 to a credit card processor - money that could have gone to the charity had they simply done a bank transfer instead.

Of course, for many charity donors paying by credit card is fine - better a moderately efficient donation that happens than a highly efficient donation that doesn't happen because of the inconvenience barrier!

[1] https://www.jefftk.com/p/earning-to-give-transcript

Can’t speak to the payment timelines, but the fact that fb gives me more control is nice.

Also, from their documentation, it looks like nonprofits do see my name. The opt in is for sharing my email.

Here's a breakdown of our processing fees:

* Facebook: None. They cover the credit card fee. If you're interested to see what data nonprofits get from Facebook, here's exactly what I see for our 2018 fundraisers: https://i.imgur.com/lsCFqJh.png. Facebook has not taken noticeably longer to disburse funds than foundations we've worked with.

* Stripe donations: 2.2% + $0.30 for Visa / Mastercard, 3.5% for American Express (this is the nonprofit rate)

* Receiving checks: $25/check. We outsource receiving checks to a vendor to make sure they don't get lost and that we aways have scans on file.

* Benevity / electronic transfers / wires: None (our bank charges no wire fee)

On top of that, it's important to note that checks and manual ACH / wire transfers take the most processing time for me, as for each check I need to work with our accountants to ensure donor information is properly on file and the donor received any needed tax documentation. We're small enough where I'm still doing this myself for each check, which probably takes me 20-30 minutes for each donation. Up to an hour if the donor didn't include all their tax information with the check.

As a donor, I've found myself giving more often through Facebook to keep my contact information more private. I tend to unsubscribe from mailing lists and set up Gmail filters, so perhaps I'm more sensitive to unsolicited mail than average.

In my experience, most of the charities and institutions I've donated to directly (e.g. Red Cross, National Park Foundation, my university) send mail for years after a donation. Some of them like the National Park Foundation share your information with other charities so you get even more unsolicited mail.

In contrast, as far as I can tell, I haven't received any physical mail nor email after donating through Facebook. The privacy, for lack of a better word, is compelling enough I'd prefer to look up a charity on Facebook rather than going to their website directly.