Donate to Charity with Affiliate Links

February 3, 2010 2:52 AM

Are there any programs out there that will allow me to find charities with affiliate ID's, so I can insert them into links on my blog?

I'm not looking for charity affiliates that will pay me a commission for referrals or sign-ups -- I am not interested in making any money off of affiliate linking, at all.

When I link out to a site with an affiliate program, I'd like to include a legitimate affiliate ID for a legitimate charity organization. I want the organization to get the full commission off of every click.

A nice-to-have would be a way to track the amount of donations that went to chosen charities via my links.

Are there any programs or services that do this sort of thing? I've googled "charity affiliate," but that mostly brings back programs that will pay me a commission for referrals. I've also looked at some major charity websites, but haven't found what I'm looking for.

If there's not a program like this in existence, is there anybody who'd be interested in working together to set one up (again, as a volunteer effort - I'm not looking to make a single red cent off of this)?

And yes, I do know that MetaFilter has an Amazon affiliate ID. I've considered applying that to my Amazon links, but I'm interested in supporting charitable organizations with other links, too.

posted by syzygy to Computers & Internet (4 answers total)

I don't know of any programs such as you describe, but you could just find a charity you support, and ask them for their affiliate ID (or just find it in the links and copy it). You won't have separate tracking, but unless you own a really popular website, your few links aren't going to be a huge impact.
posted by teaperson at 5:22 AM on February 3, 2010

The tracking thing could be an issue. I've actually been looking at this myself and the best solution I could come up with is create a separate affiliate account or sub ID for the charity, and then just donate it monthly or when it reaches a certain amount. That way you know how much they are making and can provide that number to your users, you can gather campaign data and optimize to make more money and you have full control over the campaign.
posted by Elminster24 at 11:20 AM on February 3, 2010

Best answer: There used to be a program called givequick.org that let you randomly assign or specifically assign your Amazon affiliate codes to various charities, but after a year or two of it being up, it apparently ran afoul of non-profit rules and they eventually took it down. Here's the archive.org version from ten years ago.
posted by mathowie at 7:13 AM on February 4, 2010

Response by poster: Thanks all. Since it seems that there's nothing like it out there, I decided to buy a few domains and see if I can get something off the ground.

I'm not interested in funneling any money through the 'organization' (thereby removing questions of fraud or impropriety). Rather, I'd like for the site to act as a clearing house for verified affiliate IDs that belong to legitimate charities.

I set up a WordPress blog at http://affiliatesforcharity.org with some ideas on it. I also bought the domain 4char.it. I was thinking it would be nice to set up a link-shortener that made it easy for people to generate recognizable, shortened charity links like http://4chari.t/y?d3ix .

The shortener could work something like this: you grab your link to amazon (or whatever site pays affiliate commissions), drop it into the shortener, and are given a list of charities that have affiliate codes for Amazon. Choose your charity from the list and get a shortened link that redirects to the original URL, with the charity's affiliate ID added in.

I'll put a post up at projects, and drop a link to it here, if that's ok...
posted by syzygy at 1:35 AM on February 5, 2010