Donate online to a Gabriola charity
Did you know that you can donate online to any of Gabriola’s registered charities? This method is easy, convenient, and offers options that I love.
Interested? Hop over to CanadaHelps. Type Gabriola in the search box and you get to a this list of Gabriola charities. Click the name of a charity to learn more about it on the charity’s individual listing page. There you’ll find donate now and donate monthly buttons. Click the one you want, and follow along as prompted.
You’ll get a tax receipt from CanadaHelps, instead of from the individual Gabriola charity to which you donated.
I love using CanadaHelps because it gives me privacy options I don’t get if I give cash directly to a charity. When I donate through CanadaHelps, I select one of these options:
- Provide my name, address and email address to the charity(ies) I am donating to
- Provide my name and mailing address only
- Provide my name and email address only
- Provide my name only
- Anonymous donation: do not provide any of my personal or contact information to charity(ies) I am donating to
If I do choose to give my contact information to a charity, I there are further options to consider. The website says:
CanadaHelps cannot control how often a charity contacts its donors. However we can pass on your request about how you would like to be contacted. Please indicate your contact preference:
- Never: please request that the charities I donate to do not contact me
- Annually
- Quarterly
- At the charity’s discretion
How cool is that? In the past I’ve been frustrated with charities for spending part of what I give them on stupid stuff they send me in the mail. I don’t want to pay for paper, postage, and public relations — I just want to donate. So now I donate anonymously through CanadaHelps, and that’s that! No more silly stuff in the mail, no more special appeals phone calls. I love this.
If you’re thinking of making a year-end donation to a good cause on Gabriola, here’s your chance! And you don’t even have to leave your house.
Filed in Gabriola Island 3 Comments so far
3 Responses to “Donate online to a Gabriola charity”
Hilary Peach on 31 Dec 2009 at 12:07 pm #
Hi
Thanks for reminding people that they can donate to a Gabriola charity through Canada Helps.
To be fair, though, not all charities solicit from their members, make those annoying phone calls or send piles of crap in the mail. Poetry Gabriola, for example, seldom sends material to it’s members, and never phones. However, we think it is essential to build relationships with our members, and we are consequently able to cite a statistic of 352 active members in the organization when we are applying to public sector funders. So it is very useful to us to know who our member-donors are.
Likewise it is statistically useful for PGS to issue tax receipts directly to donors.
The options offered through Canada Helps are great, though. And I thank you again for reminding everyone. (Do you know if they take a cut?)
Happy New Year!
Hilary
Hilary Peach on 31 Dec 2009 at 12:20 pm #
PS
FYI Canada Helps takes a 4% transaction fee. It isn’t much, but it is a $4 fee on a $100 donation …
hp
Gabriolan on 31 Dec 2009 at 2:26 pm #
Hello, Hilary!
I realize that not all charities do the things that annoy me. However, lots of charities do indeed take the approach that I find frustrating. So if I’m thinking about donating to a charity, I have two options:
OPTION ONE: ask the charity all about their privacy policy, contact policy, etc. Make special requests so that I won’t get additional funding appeals in the mail, a calendar at the end of the year, or a Christmas card that just happens to include a postage-paid donation envelope. Make sure they won’t publish my name in a advertisement, or on some stupid Wall of Donors. Make sure they won’t sell, trade, or otherwise share my personal details with other businesses or charities.
OPTION TWO: Donate through CanadaHelps, and set the privacy options the way I want them. Easy, no?
For me it’s a no-brainer: I like the CanadaHelps approach. As a donor, I will choose whether I want to allow an organization with me or not. If I want to get involved with a particular charity, I know how to do that.
Now, I must say that I am impressed with Poetry Gabriola these days, because it seems well-organized. Well-organized things make me happy. I’m even happier to hear that you don’t
If you want to have a better chance at convincing grumpy burned-out people like me to join Poetry Gabriola, you could do that by putting a privacy policy page and a contact policy page on your website. Also, you could explain exactly how it helps your organization (in terms of funding) when an individual becomes a member. Oh, and on your contact policy page you could explain that you won’t send calendars (oh MY I hate paper calendars) or other nonsense in the mail. Tell potential donors exactly where the money goes, and show how little of it goes to mailing stuff to the donor list each year.
Oh dear. That was a bit of a tangent, wasn’t it?
Happy New Year to you, too. Cheers!