Charitable Giving: How Much, and to Whom?

It was getting close to the end of the Australian financial year (June 30th), and as I reviewed my financial situation I thought, “Oh! I have teh monies!! What to do with them?” So, I gave a few hundred dollars to charity.

The reasons for giving to charity are many and varied, but for me the prime drivers were: 1) the reasoning that I have more than I really ‘need’, so that giving to those with greater needs increases net wellbeing (which makes me feel good); and 2) I feel like it’s the right thing to do.

I’ve donated to causes here and there for years, but since starting full-time work I’ve put off donations because I wanted to put a bit more thought into what I was doing, namely:

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Donating for Them, Or for Yourself?

Updated on Thursday, January 13, 2011 at 13:56 by MCJ

Accompanying the Twitter commentary of the Queensland floods (see #QLDfloods) I’ve noticed a number of people writing that they’ll donate $1 every time their message gets “retweeted” (RTed; forwarded, in Twitter, parlance). The first message I saw was from @lilithia. I can’t say for certain whether she started the trend, and once I started looking I found several others – e.g. @AUSteambieberr, @bree_101, @xander85 –, but they all seemed to share two initial characteristics:

• These were ordinary people
• The donations were uncapped

The second point, especially, struck me: late last year Daniel Keogh, a science presenter on the ABC, promised to donate $5 to beyondblue⁽¹⁾ for every time he was retweeted (until 10pm), but his offer took off and he ended up with a nominal figure of over $17,000 dollars. That was far above Keogh’s self-imposed limit, but he ended up donating $5000 and the story made it into the papers.

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