If you shop at Amazon and are not using AmazonSmile, your favorite non-profit is missing out on money!
For the past 4 years, Amazon has donated millions of dollars to charities by having shoppers go through the AmazonSmile website. You, the buyer, shop just as you normally would and Amazon gives 0.5% of your purchase to the non-profit of your choice. It costs you, the buyer, absolutely nothing. The only catch is that you have to purchase through the AmazonSmile website.
Remembering to go to the AmazonSmile website is the hardest part of the whole endeavor. Luckily there are some browser plugins that will do that redirection for you:
- Chrome – Smile Aways
- Firefox – Smile Redirect
- Safari – SmileAllDay
If you shop at Amazon I encourage you to install a plugin to make sure you are buying through AmazonSmile and helping, even if it’s just a little, a non-profit you love.
My donations go to Distributed Proofreaders, you can select them for your charity on AmazonSmile using this link.
To be clear, I’m not encouraging anyone to shop at Amazon who isn’t already (shop at local merchants whenever possible!) but if you are shopping there, I encourage you to use AmazonSmile.
Digital Ramblings 
I’m not a fan of Amazon Smile. I think it’s a pretty transparent and cheap attempt to buy positive association for the Amazon brand. The amount that goes to charity is de minimis.
If I used Smile for all of my Amazon shopping, charity would get maybe $2-3 additional dollars annually. That’s such a small amount it’s not worth spending any of my time trying to make online shopping more complicated. Maybe other people have vastly higher Amazon spending to background charity contribution ratios.
A much higher impact activity I’d like to promote is taking advantage of any employer matching for charitable giving you might have. For example, Dell matches $10,000 in employee charitable giving annually, 1:1. Doubling your impact is well worth the additional effort there (you have to make donations through a special website instead of directly to the 501(c)(3)).
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I agree that employer matching is most certainly the way to go. I’m bummed that my current employer doesn’t do any matching — but then again they are a small startup.
AmazonSmile donation amounts are really small and I agree it’s not worth spending time trying to do it — which is why the browser transparent redirect plugins are great: they require no thinking to leverage AmazonSmile if you shop through your browser. For me, using AmazonSmile is totally a zero-effort task which is why I think it’s worth doing.
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