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But smaller organizations will be missed entirely. My charity is a cat shelter in St. Louis. I’d rather they get my cut than a larger charity that means less to me and has bigger fundraising machinery.

This is exactly right. I help run a small local non-profit makerspace, and donations through Smile help keep the space open and free, without a membership fee.

How much was the makerspace getting from Smile, if you can answer that?

I'm involved with some small makerspaces. The largest has a few hundred members.

If a quarter of them both used Smile and pledged their donations to us (a quarter is almost certainly way too high), let's say that's 100 people.

If the average person spends about $1000 on Amazon (almost certainly too high [1]), then that's $5 per person, or $500 per year total.

I guess it's something, but all those estimates are on the high end for the spaces I know, and still wouldn't cover a couple weeks' rent.

1. Prime members spend an average of $1400/yr, non-prime members spend $600, and roughly one out of the adults are prime members. https://www.fool.com/the-ascent/personal-finance/articles/th...

Name? I'll get some folks to donate.

Animal House Cat Rescue: https://www.stlcats.org/

They do great work.

Indeed. But these things tend to follow a log tale for benefit-to-charity and constant to increasing marginal costs. If it costs Amazon $2 in SMILE proceeds to donate $0.02 for a quarter, then it makes sense, if only for that particular charity, to not process it. This is independent of whether Amazon directly foots the bill or indirectly foots the bill via commitments and outlay portions of the SMILE allocations.

Yes and small charities like this are generally volunteer-run and a very high percentage of their income goes to their charitiable purpose.

Large charities leech off the existence of the problems they are claiming to solve. If they actually solved them, they wouldn't be needed any more. Name any large organization that has ever worked itself out of needing to exist. And their executives make a lot of money.

Are you saying that e.g. homelessness in America has not been solved because the organizations working on it are not trying to solve it?

California allocated 7 billion in 2022 to homelessness. There are 172,000 homeless in California. So that is $40,000 per homeless person, per year, in just state funds. Lot's of people keep a roof over their heads while making less money than that a year. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Dude. There were 172,000 homeless people counted in one night.

Among those people, some were chronically homeless, which basically means mentally ill, disabled and/or addicted to something. Nobody is paying for housing and health care for these people for less than $40k per year.

The majority of those people, however, are not in that group. They also didn’t stay homeless all year - over the course of one year, many times that number were nearly homeless and got help from those funds to avoid it (pay back rent to avoid eviction, pay a deposit on a new place, etc), or used these funds for services while homeless - shelter, job training, medical care, assistance applying for disability payments, etc. Besides directly funding these services, the money was also spent in paying people to manage job training programs, run the shelters, be social workers who know how disability applications work, be social workers who have to find their homeless clients to tell them about work opportunities, track available spaces in rehab programs, ……………

Your attempted equivalency there is missing so much information that it is uselessly wrong.

I’m sure that the frontline workers for those organizations are earnest and genuine in their effort to help, but it’s also undoubtedly true that there’s a lot of money to be made (and it’s not really in the interest of those making the money to see the problem solved). If you search the term “homeless industrial complex”, you’ll see lots of hot takes on this. I’m not really endorsing any specific perspective, but I suspect that, as always, the truth is mixed and complex.

I thought that recent years had finally taught most people that “the truth is in the middle” is not a rational default position.

I said the truth is mixed and complex, not that it is "in the middle". The last few years provide examples of that which are as good as any other time.

"there's money to be made" is one of the weakest arguments there is. Capitalism makes it all about money! There's little doing without it.

This opinion can lead to some really ignorant statements (which I've heard before) :

- Full time jobs at charities? Money laundering for sure, they should reject their salary and starve. - Investing in clean energy? A conspiracy, some people make money there. - Recycling? People are paid to do it, it's a sham. - Politician not forfeiting his salary? Corruption, they shouldn't make a living (or just take brides under the table).

"There's money to be made" isn't an argument. The world is not a binary, just because I am implying that some part of an industry is cronyism and grift, doesn't mean that I am asserting that it is 100% the case. It would be equally dumb to assert that it is 0%.

Well, that one is easy. It's a multi million dollar regulatory capture operation. TODCO in SF is a classic operation. Check out their revenue numbers.

> Name any large organization that has ever worked itself out of needing to exist.

This is an interesting take, but got me wondering, what organization _period_ has ever worked itself out of needing to exist? I'd love to hear examples.

I mean, you can always just donate 10$ a month to them, which will probably be much more than a tiny cat shelter gets from Amazon Smile.

I'd encourage you to ask the shelter how much they get from Amazon Smile. My guess is it's $200-300 max, which is barely enough to save a single cat.

Worse, there is a well-known phenomenon [1] where if people's "guilt" is taken away, then they are less likely to donate overall. That is, for at least some portion of people, they probably mark a small charity as their Amazon Smile recipient and then think "Great, I'm donating to charity!", not realizing their donations are like 50 cents. But if they didn't sign up for Amazon Smile they might be more likely to actually donate a real amount.

To be clear, I'm all for small charities getting money, but I'd almost rather it be like a lottery or something so a smaller number of small charities could get money they could actually do something with.

1. https://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/15/books/chapters/freakonomi...

I volunteer for a charity where each and every $500 donation supports a kid going through a program. That program regularly changes kids' life trajectories in a way that has a difficult to quantify multiplier effect throughout the community.

I am highly skeptical of wisdom of utilitarianism in charitable giving. No one has non-toy models so the math is all made up nonsense. More importantly, proximity between the giver and the recipient has profound agency effects that are completely ignored by most utilitarians. You tend to get better outcomes when you allow agents to center their personal projects, even if resources aren't optimally allocated when ignoring this "agent centering effect".

This. I am not a demographic utilitarians usually target. Despite that my family received support from government and charitable programs when I was a child. Without them I doubt I would have been able perform in school and ultimately get the job that I have today. Now I make enough money that I donate to charities.

Realistically, corporate donations are almost entirely measured by the "gross value added to brand/reputation."

Not "actual worth to society."

A market based, consumer driven approach like Amazon Smile, is likely optimal.

Consumers, on average, are very effective and logical choosers (on average).

Amazon Smile was likely a highly effective program.

Issue is, Amazon now wants to redirect its customer's dollars to improve its reputation.

Riffing on this: if you thought about charity in the "maximize social utility function" way that SV types tend to talk, wouldn't you suspect that Amazon Smile would also be an actually a good way of allocating charitable dollars? Or at least better than a megacorp picking and choosing? Markets work, wisdom of the crowds, and so on.

There's something very "early 21st century social trust crisis" about keeping the "capitalist utlitarianism" logos of neoliberalism while throwing out the "democratized decision making" ethos of neoliberalism.

Totally this. Our company had a diversity hiring initiative and I wanted to do some outreach in our area so I reached out about sponsoring an LGBTQ+ event. As a primary sponsor on the bill, my anticipation was that our goodwill gesture would go a good distance in the community and we should leave it at that, but HQ wanted a signup sheet with us trying to get people’s info for recruiting and numbers to publish for the HR team to show their money wasn’t just “thrown to the wind.” I got very cynical about doing events like that after that. It’s not really giving if you expect something in return.

Like, I get it, it’s not just a slush fund, but maybe it sort of should be. Does every dollar spent have to have clear ROI? Where’s the charity?

> Where’s the charity?

Carefully recorded in tax filings.

IMO the best thing you can do is reaching out to high school teachers teaching programming.

A coworker had an interested high school student come in for the day/week a few times, and shadow them.

For many kids whose parents have never heard of white collar work, it can be life changing to have a good impression.

High school teachers teaching programming? Is that even a thing everywhere? Growing up where I did, it’s a laughable idea.

Amazon has been historically very stingy with their donations.

Internally, employees have begged for literally decades for an employee donation matching program (similar to Microsoft's donation matching) and have been stonewalled for years, with upper leadership not wanting to give a firm answer as to why.

Meanwhile, most of the philanthropic endeavors that Amazon does offer its employees internally are in some way otherwise related to things that Jeff has a fiduciary tie to or where doing so was politically motivated to turn a blind eye to the rapid expansion of the Downtown/SLU Seattle Campus.

Other large companies are similar. I worked for one multinational where they only allowed employee donation matching in narrow cases:

- certain large universities

- certain large hospitals

And that's it. I wrote to HR multiple times asking if my local health related charity could be part of their matching donations. Finally got a terse answer saying "no, only the ones on the list."

Some enterprises are so scared of anything remotely resembling controversy that they severely restrict matching, and others just don't offer it at all.

Meanwhile, Microsoft is fantastic about employee matching.

And the smile program was another example of that. Had to use the correct url or nothing went to charity. They could have made it a setting for the user, or an option during checkout.

I bet if the offered round up for charity in the checkout process the funds collected would dwarf those raised by the smile program.

Was it even possible to do in the app?

Yes, for the app it's a one-off setting. If you only purchase via the app, no need to remember the smile URL.

... I tried to remember to use smile for years and never knew about the app setting :-(

>Or, a less cynical take is that they really can have more impact by focusing on fewer charities.

It's hard not to be cynical when you look at the charities they are focusing on. All of them are in-house, and seem positioned to strongly benefit Amazon. Like the one where they brag about building houses near the Amazon major headquarters.

Or, a more cynical take is that I only seemed to get reminders to go to smile.amazon.com if I had arrived via an affiliate link. I always suspected that it was a money-saving strategy, that if I clicked the reminder and arrived at smile.amazon.com, that maybe they wouldn't have to pay the affiliate commission. But I never looked into it at all, so that was just my pure speculation.

The whole point of affiliate links is that they're generating sales that wouldn't have existed without- it is essentially an incentive for people to advertise for Amazon in organic ways. Whether the money goes to the affiliate or the smile program at that point wouldn't really make much difference, and actively undermining the people who post affiliate links seems like it would be a stereotypically idiotic corporate split brain thing to do.

I don't often click on affiliate links, but I also don't recall seeing the smile reminder when I have used them. YMMV I guess.

I use a greasemonkey script that removes all affiliate links and specifically goes to smile.amazon.com so I don't have to think about it.

not sure how that follows... the impacts of donating has diminishing returns. I'd much rather see a diverse of array of causes supported. I doubt any of these charities rely on Amazon Smile as a primary source of donations but a lot of smaller charities would benefit

Funny sidenote is that my chosen charity was actually ProPublica

Couldn't they just make the charity list much shorter? While still giving users a choice?

> which is only about 100 charities from the top (ordered by total amount received) received just over $10,000, and the charity at the top of the third page received $5659.

Honestly, this seems rather impressive. A lot higher than I thought! That's great! The reason I expected lower is because these tend to follow power laws with a very steep decline. The 200th charity makes more than half what the 100th charity makes is pretty good. I had to go through 19 pages of charities (I counted 126 lines on one page, but I probably miscounted so +/- some) before I started to see them go below $1k. That's quite impressive though, there's over 2k charities getting over $1k

> So it seems imminently reasonable to me that, rather than give a couple hundred bucks a year to thousands and thousands and thousands of charities, to instead consolidate that to fewer charities where it can do some sizable good.

Specifically, where it can most efficiently buy image and influence for Amazon. For profit corporations charitable donations, like any other expenditures of corporate funds, are made to advance the commercial interests of the corporation.

Who is the “they” in “They would have bigger impact”, by what criteria, and why does this “they” have any relevance to the effectiveness whatsoever?

Seriously. Amazon is literally just writing a check, or just as likely, putting store credit in an account.

Where do they figure in to donating at all beyond a middle man?

Seriously, how does Amazon differ than GoFundMe in this context? And as a follow up, if this is such a good move for “effectiveness” why shouldn’t GoFundMe do they same thing?

$ !== impact

Put another way, not every (e.g.) $5000 yields the same impact.

More in fewer hands? Where have we've seen that before? How's that working out for us?

> consolidate that to fewer charities where it can do some sizable good.

It also gives Amazon much more control over the charity. If you give $1000 to a charity, they are happy and do their thing. If you give a charity $1,000,000 your priorities are going to become their priorities.

Reading through the list, I see planned parenthood listed many many times. Planned parenthood of Arizona, planned parenthood of Wisconsin, etc. I imagine if you added them all up, planned parenthood was getting a tidy sum of donations from Amazon smile.

It's a franchise model. Makes quite a bit of money. It was one of the things I wanted to run as a franchisee but a bit complex.

If your “less cynical” (I’d say “more naive” :P) take is true, then where’s their concurrent announcement that they’re donating .5% of sales (or at least .5* * % of revenue that was amazon-smiled since not everyone used it) to a smaller set of organizations?

No I had my own preferred charity which was part of the smile program. It just seems a bad customer experience taking away a feature that myself and others cherished in Amazon prime. Another wrong decision.

At page 1232 were and 30.43 or so. So it dropped off fast and then leveled out - long tail.