Amazon has announced that they are closing their Smile program effective from February and this will be a blow to the donations we receive. The scheme used to generate a donation whenever a registered user purchases eligible products from the Amazon Smile store (essentially a duplicate of the main store). These donations were quite small as you can see from my statement and we hoped for more sign-ups but they were a free bonus that helped us pay for the ongoing costs of caring for the dogs. You can read Amazon's announcement here:
https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/company-news/amazon-closing-amazonsmile-to-focus-its-philanthropic-giving-to-programs-with-greater-impact
Unfortunately, the new programmes do nothing for smaller charities for us. This is frustrating as we've received very little notice about this. We'll of course contact them to see if they are looking to continue helping in any way, but the way this has been handled doesn't offer much hope.
However, there are alternatives.
We've posted about easyfundraising and Give as You Live before and if enough of our supporters used them while shopping online they have the potential to transform how we can fund our operations without costing shoppers anything. They're supported by a huge range of retailers and the donations tend to be more generous than Amazon's so this could be better for all of us in the long term. They also run some excellent offers that not only can save you money, but raise more for us.
They're not perfect and you need to make sure that you use their websites and/or apps to ensure the donations are tracked. Retailers' apps don't always work properly so you need to use the websites for shopping - this isn't always convenient, especially for your big supermarket shops, but even if you use them for some shops or special deals every little bit soon adds up. For people who use browsers, you can install handy add-ons that will let you know if a retailer supports the scheme when you visit their web stores and ask you if you want to track a donation. If you are not sure what this means then shout out and I'll help if I can.
Finally, if you use my personal referral links then once you've raised £5 we receive an additional £5 donation free. I've also copied screenshots of my current statements for both schemes and as you can see takeaways, e-|Bay, Etsy and many other stores can earn donations. Together we can make the difference without costing anything extra - will you make the difference?
https://www.easyfundraising.org.uk/support-a-good-cause/step-1/?char=45963&invite=8ik9ub&referral-campaign=s2s&cid=45963&name=Michael
https://www.giveasyoulive.com/refer/R9UoZA4yjntKlOrMZIfyog7ag0qzM9sKNA-3D-3D
Please share with friends, family and anyone who can sign up and help us continue our work. Thank You!
No comments:
Post a Comment