Dollar A Day: Kickstarter Co-Founder’s New Website Lets You Support Hundreds of Nonprofits Every Year
Perhaps you’ve daydreamed about being the sort of magnanimous individual who supports hundreds of nonprofits.
On the other hand, perhaps you don’t quite have the spare cash to be a mega-philanthropist. Consider, then, a new project launched today by Kickstarter co-founder Perry Chen and a group of collaborators.
The premise of Dollar A Day is right there in the name. Every day, the service highlights a new nonprofit — on its site and by way of a concise email. You can sign up merely to receive this information and learn about these organizations and causes.
Or you can go a step further and agree to give each day’s highlighted group $1.
The idea is that while a lonely dollar isn’t much of a sacrifice for most individuals, if a lot of individuals give a buck apiece, it could add up to a significant de-facto group donation. It is, in other words, a clever effort to connect the crowdfunding notion (which Chen helped popularize with Kickstarter) to worthy causes.
But to hear Chen describe the service, the dollar-a-day part sounds almost like a secondary goal. “It’s an education platform, first and foremost,” he told me. “You know the nonprofits you know, or that your friends brought up with you, or you see on the news.” Meanwhile, there are many organizations you might be interested in, but how do you find them? Google “cool nonprofits”?
This problem is what led to the project: “What is the smallest, simplest thing we could design that could have the biggest impact?”
In other words, just following the emails has its own value — maybe you’ll learn about a group you particularly want to support or engage with, either financially or through volunteering.
Or, if you like the idea of sharing the wealth, a dollar at a time, you can go all in; you’ll get charged $30 every 30 days. The donations (all tax deductible) are processed and distributed by Network for Good.
You can browse through the first 60 or so nonprofits on Dollar A Day’s calendar here: From ShelterBox (which provides disaster relief) to Girls Who Code to the Lunchbox Fund. (Once you sign up, you’re on the hook to support each day’s nonprofit, so even if you’re vehemently opposed to girls who code, you can’t opt out on a cause-specific basis; you can cancel your membership so that it ends altogether at the conclusion of any 30-day cycle. Details on the site.)
The nonprofits are chosen based almost entirely on publically available data. “In general, we are excited to feature things we don’t think are as well known,” Chen said. “Unfortunately, in the nonprofit space, that’s a lot of things.”
On some level, of course, this can all sound like so-called slacktivism — a largely passive way of feeling like you’ve done your good deeds, so you can get back to posting selfies on Instagram. Chen said he and collaborators have considered this critique. (Almost all are working on a volunteer basis; Dollar A Day doesn’t get any money from the donations people make; its “minimal” expenses are covered by an “anonymous” group of private donors, a representative told me.) And they have been at pains to position their message as a starting point to engagement — not a painless copout.
“We don’t have irrational expectations; we don’t expect everyone to read every email every day,” he said. The service doesn’t replace any existing means of nonprofit support, but if it catches on, it could be a powerful new way to get attention (and money) to deserving groups.
“We want this,” Chen said, “to be a gateway.”
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