Bstow

Bstow is a free micro-donation app that automatically donates your spare change. All you have to do is choose one of the 1.5 million non-profits on the app, and then link your credit card, debit card, or bank account. With every purchase you make, Bstow will round up to the nearest dollar and donate the difference.

Givelify

Givelify is a no-thrills donation app that gets the job done. With just three taps, you can donate to any of the over 1.9 million non-profit organizations on the app. Givelify keeps track of your donation history, so the process is as transparent as possible. The app also has a GPS feature that shows local charities and fundraisers you can support.

PocketCause

PocketCause is a social network app for non-profits. Donating on PocketCause is easy, especially since the app supports tax-deductible giving by keeping track of your tax receipts. You can also see what charities your friends and other members of the PocketCause community are supporting. The app sends personal updates on the impact of your donation and aggregates news on the causes you care about.

SnapDonate

SnapDonate is a self-proclaimed “magic lens” donation app. If you ever come across the logo of a charity you’d like to support, simply open up SnapDonate’s camera, and point it at the image. SnapDonate will recognize the charity’s logo, just like a QR code. Then, you can select how much you’d like to donate and voilà! You can also find other non-profits to support using the app’s search tool.

Facebook

Yup, that’s right. Facebook makes it incredibly easy to donate to causes, so this is the perfect option for anyone who is super busy (or lazy) this holiday season. Simply go to a non-profit’s Facebook page, and click the blue “Donate” button under the page’s banner image. You’ll be directed to a donation page, either on Facebook itself or on the charity’s own website. You can also donate to specific fundraisers, which are displayed on the non-profit’s Facebook page as well.

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Donations doubled this year compared to last, and many nonprofits around the world saw a typically quiet Tuesday become a fundraising day!

Keep Giving Tuesday going all year, $1 at a time

Many of us aren’t the philanthropists we’d like to be. But we can still make a difference.

One easy way to keep the Giving Tuesday spirit alive is the One Today app by Google. (Download it at the Google Play Store.)

This simple app alerts you each day about a cause that you may be interested in. You can learn more about it or search for other causes.

The best part? Google makes is ridiculously easy to donate $1 to the cause (or more). It even helps you rally your friends if you want to (but that’s not required). They even make it incredibly easy for you to challenge your friends by matching their gifts.

As you give to projects on One Today, the app learns what projects interest you and will show you more and more causes in line with your values.

For a fundraising guy like me, this app is pretty cool.

Make a gift today

To get started, just download the app at the Google Play Store.

Giving has never been easier!

If you’re a nonprofit, you can learn more about registering for One Today at http://www.google.com/onetoday/nonprofits.html.

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Yet, I have not seen a single news story about Giving Tuesday which is today!

It’s a simple idea. Just find a way for your family, your community, your company or your organization to come together to give something more. Then tell everyone you can about how you are giving. Be a part of a national celebration of our great tradition of generosity.

Instead of only focusing in on how you can spend money on yourself and gifts for others, this day was created so you could take some of your energy and dollars and put them towards worthy causes.

Last year, we started the #GivingTuesday weekly column here to shine a light on organizations that needed it and to encourage you to help. Today we want you to take the time to step up and make the world a better place.

Take and Share an #UNselfie on Instagram & Facebook

Upload a selfless selfie to your Instagram account and use the hashtags #UNselfie and #GivingTuesday to let the world know you support the cause.

Tweet Your Support

Here are a few tweets that you can copy and paste to help get the word out.

• #GivingTuesday is a day for everyone, everywhere, to GIVE! @GivingTues
• Celebrate #GivingTuesday- donate to a @GivingTues partner at givingtuesday.org
• Enough shopping –time for GIVING! Happy #GivingTuesday! @GivingTues

Post on Facebook to Show Your Support

Handy dandy status updates that can make a difference.

• Join the worldwide #GivingTuesday movement – take a moment to visit givingtuesday.org and donate to an organization that speaks to a cause you believe in!
• #GivingTuesday is a day for everyone, everywhere, to GIVE! Find a cause that matters to you at Givingtuesday.org
• Tell me how YOU are participating in #GivingTuesday. Take a video of your #GivingTuesday activities or take an #UNSelfie, and share what you’re doing on Facebook. Twitter or Instagram!

Change Your Avatars and Photos for the Day

We all know people may not notice when you get a haircut, but they do notice when you change your avatar. Consider using one of these to get even more attention.

Visit GivingTuesday.org to Find Out More

Take the time to find out as much as you can about this movement because I hope we can all agree it is better and more important than any of the other “special” days around Thanksgiving.

Giving Tuesday has a great website full of information. Be sure that you don’t miss their partner list of organizations who are actively involved.

Thank you for helping make this years #GivingTuesday a big success!

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And I count myself among you.

But no more! Today, it’s time to rise up and actually make a difference for charities and causes across our digital plain.

Today is Social Media Giving Day.

The middle of July is not usually when we think about giving to charities. If you’re like me, it’s usually as the year end approaches when taxes start to come to mind, or when your wife tells you to. (Thank God most of you aren’t like me, right? Heh.)

But now, as we recover from our national birthday, we have an opportunity to support the incredible work done by groups to help those in need. Today, July 15, marks the first Social Media Giving Day in the U.S. Mayors and Governors across America have declared it to be so, and consumers and organizations are being asked to leverage social media as a means to give to their favorite charity or cause.

I talked to Chris Sommers, cofounder of Givver.com, a platform that allows Twitter users to Tweet donations to charities about this movement, of sorts. He hopes summertime becomes a season of giving to offset the normally slow fundraising months many charities have in the Dog Days.

Texting donations for charitable purposes is commonplace but oftentimes up to 40 percent of text donations go to the wireless carrier, not the charity.

Social media giving tools include Sommers’ Givver.com, as well as Fundly.com, Snowball.com, and various custom tools that have been developed by charitable organizations themselves, such as SocialFund.org and GoFundMe.com.

To use Givver, for example, a consumer or organization signs up at Givver.com using a secure form. From that point, they can simply Tweet #Give along with a dollar amount at a specific charity, for example: #Give $10 @FeedingAmerica. The donation is immediate, surprisingly easy, and (at least for now) Givver doesn’t charge you or the charity a fee.

Mayoral and Gubernatorial declarations establishing July 15 as Social Media Giving Day have been made by Governor Jay Nixon (Missouri), Mayor John Sorey (Naples, Fla.), Mayor Buddy Dyer (Orlando), Mayor Nancy McFarlane (Raleigh, N.C.), Mayor Mark Mallory (Cincinnati), Mayor Tom Barrett (Milwaukee), Mayor Jacques Roy (Alexandria, La.), Mayor Francis Slay (St. Louis), and the entire City Council in Pittsburgh, Pa. (Go Buccos!)

Sommers says giving through social channesl may just give some meaning to social media us collective blovators (my word not his) have yet to surface. He’s right.

So in my best political and/or plea for action voice, I strongly urge you to take a few minutes and make a donation to your favorite cause or charity today. And then tell the world. Because there’s a chance we might actually be able to do some good with social media.

Besides that aimed at our own egos. Heh.

The post Hey, Put Your Twitter Where Your Mouth Is appeared first on Social Media Explorer.

The timing couldn’t have been better as I was getting ready to sit down and write this week’s #GivingTuesday post.

The No Kid Hungry campaign connects kids in need with nutritious food and teaches their families how to cook healthy, affordable meals. The campaign also engages the public to make ending childhood hunger a national priority.

Share Our Strength began in the basement of a row house on Capitol Hill in 1984, in response to the ‘84-‘85 famine in Ethiopia. Brother and sister Bill and Debbie Shore started the organization with the belief that everyone has a strength to share in the global fight against hunger and poverty, and that in these shared strengths lie sustainable solutions.

Stop and think about the fact that 1 in 5 American children struggle with having enough food to eat. That should shock and appall you. Just think about how much food you and your family threw away last week and then realize that we are talking about 16 million kids.

What I love about this initiative is that while they will happily take your donation, they really want your actions and words to do the heavy lifting.

They’ve embraced social media to make it very easy for anyone to tweet out the latest statistics or to share a video on Facebook. They realize that educating our country about this problem is the first step to finding a solution.

As a parent, I was psyched to discover a youth focused site so that our children can also become aware of the issue and take their own actions to help.

No Kid Hungry does a great job of educating everyone about the problem and giving tangible and easy things that can be done by anyone to make a difference. They’ve also partnered with some great organizations that both help get the word out, but also are working towards helping end the campaign by making sure our kids get food.

We live in one of the greatest nations in the world and the fact that we still have children every day wondering where their next meal will come from angers me. If we can’t take care of our own children, who will?

Please consider donating, subscribing or taking action today to No Kid Hungry. The hungry children of our country thank you.

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So to make that a reality, I have offered SME’s platform on Tuesdays to highlight a non-profit or multiple non-profits that some of our readers feel are worthy of your donations. To support the movement I had to reach out to some friends and I’m so excited to announce that C.C. Chapman, author of Amazing Things Will Happen and Marc Pitman from the Fundraising Coachhave agreed to provide content on non-profits that they feel are not only worthy, but will also greatly benefit from our donations. So we’re giving you the recommendations every Tuesday and all you have to do is open your wallet and donate. Let’s all do our parts to make 2013 a year of giving.

What is the best way to kick this whole thing off? Howabout we all go find a charity and donate $10 RIGHT NOW! If you are looking for a non-profit for your donation jump over to Razoo’s donation list here. You can search by cause, by location, and much more to find a charity with a cause you are passionate about.

If you are interested in keeping track of end of you giving, Philanthropy has an interactive chart to show progress. So that’s it. It’s pretty simple. Let’s make 2013 a year that we all commit to donating $10 a week to a charity. And let’s start right now by giving a non-profit $10. If we can all do that, I assure you Amazing Things Will Happen.

We’d love to find a way to keep track of all the donations we band together and drive. So if you are interested please take our survey and tell us about your donation using the link below. Your information will remain anonymous and will only be used to provide aggregated reporting to our readers. At the end of the year we’ll provide a report to our readers on how much we donated. And hey, why not leave a comment with a link in case others are interested in donating as well. We’ll assume all donations are $10 unless you specify otherwise. What do you think? Can we all band together and make a big difference in 2013? 

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NOTE: Please, no self-promotion of non-profits in the comments section of these posts. Leave it to your community to recommend you. For non-profits who are interested in being highlighted this year. Feel free to reach out to C.C. Chapman or Marc Pitman on Twitter.

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