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When you make a charitable donation, you want to ensure that as much of your money as possible is going to the right place and truly helping the cause you're supporting. While we’ve warned you about outright scams in charity donations, there’s another pitfall to be aware of: online buttons that don’t actually contribute anything to the cause.
Take Change.org’s “chip in” option as an example. Typically, when you start a petition on the platform—which is a for-profit company, by the way—those signing the petition are prompted with a button asking if they’d like to chip in to help promote the petition, boosting its reach and garnering more signatures for the cause.
When a petition was created to demand charges against the police officers who killed George Floyd, it amassed over 17 million signatures. As expected, a large portion of those 17 million people decided to chip in—more than half a million, as reported by The Verge.
Although the call-out box on the petition page made it clear that funds would only go toward promoting the petition and not directly to the cause, a growing number of former Change.org employees argue that this is misleading and harmful to ask for money in this way.
“Change.org is diverting resources away from organizations that are accountable to black communities and equipped to do deeper, long-term, community-focused work for black lives and liberation,” states the open letter addressed to Change.org’s leadership. The letter further claims that, as a for-profit corporation, Change.org is “profiting from the death of black people.”
Since the publication of the open letter on Medium, Change.org has disabled the chip-in feature on some of the platform’s most popular petitions.
Ultimately, Change.org has the freedom to use any funds raised on its platform however it sees fit, and there is no obligation for the company to disclose how much money is collected or where it is spent.
That’s why it’s more important than ever to carefully review the details before donating to a cause you believe in. You can look up organizations on Charity Navigator, Givewell, or Guidestar before deciding to contribute; for GoFundMe-style campaigns and informal fundraisers, research the organizers and their plans for using the donations. We have a list of options for supporting racial justice initiatives if you’re looking for a starting point.
Contributing to support a petition or cause isn’t inherently wrong. However, lacking the full details needed to make the right choice for you is. If you're unclear on where your donation will go, take the time to ask so you can give with confidence.
