For many people, donating money to a good cause just isn’t an option on a tight budget. Sure, people would like to — especially as the holidays draw nearer — but bills usually trump any philanthropic intentions people begin.
One Chicago company is making it easier for people to make contributions to charities without having to break open their piggy banks.
Meet Giftfluence, a platform that allows users to choose from more than 840,000 charities and student organizations to donate to at no cost. No joke.
“We turn online activity into charitable donation,” said Giftfluence founder Ryan Charnov.
Using the Giftfluence platform, anytime a user shops at any one of some 500 retailers, an average of six percent of every purchase is automatically donated to a charity of the user’s choosing. Users pick an organization at the start of a shopping session, and then continue to browse offerings from brands like Nordstrom, Groupon and Starbucks.
And as of this week, users have another option to transform online browsing into charitable donations: the Giftfluence search engine. The search engine garners small donations each time you search that add up over time.
Using the platform requires no registration from a user perspective. Someone needs only to visit the website and click whether they’d rather shop or search. Then, they just pick a charity — you can filter their database by location or search for specific causes you know — and the platform will automatically lead to donations to one of more than 840,000 charities and student organizations accessible on the site.
As it stands, Giftfluence is a one-man show. The company is completely bootstrapped, and Charnov worked out of the Chicago Make Office until recently.
But that incredible sense of leanness hasn't stopped the company from partnering with blue chips across the country. On the shopping side of the house, they’ve got Macys and Walmart onboarded, and for the search engine, Charnov struck a deal with Yahoo, letting the search engine juggernaut power Giftfluence’s new product with its current, comprehensive database.
In return, Yahoo gets to sell ads on the site — and ad revenue is split up between Yahoo, Giftluence, and the charity of the user's choice. It’s part of a larger shift Charnov sees happening in digital advertising.
“To put it plainly, the way we see it is that the online advertising space changing over time and become more competitive. We think all forms of only activities beyond shopping and searching have the ability to generate money for a charitable cause.”
And charities need all the help they can get, Charnov said, especially in Illinois where charities are underfunded and not receiving support from the government they’d budgeted. After partnering with Houston Food Bank
“Just a few daily activities can really make a monumental impact,” he said.
Image via Giftfluence.
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