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ChangingThePresent ROCKS

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Every year, Americans spend $250 billion–$100 billion during the holiday season, alone–buying presents for one another. “Imagine, for one delirious moment, what we could accomplish if even a small percentage of that gift money were redirected to nonprofits working to make the world a better place.”

I love the idea for ChangingThePresent.com. Instead of an infomercial with some well-dressed British man standing around 50 starving African children making you feel terrible because you’d rather let them starve than eat out, you have a site that lets you pick what type of organization you’d like to help, based on your own preferences. Instead of feeling guilty, you feel great about giving (and without being pushed). Isn’t that what giving is supposed to be anyway?

And the cherry on the cake: a Hall of Shame for stupid gifts that you shouldn’t waste money on this Xmas.
Hat tip: Jen

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  • http://www.lifehacker.com/software/gift-ideas/give-back-with-your-holiday-gifts-223392.php Lifehacker

    Give back with your holiday gifts…

    Web site ChangingThePresent encourages you to support a good cause instead of giving traditional gifts to your loved ones this holiday season: You might discover that your friends don’t really want another fruitcake, picture frame, or pen & pencil……

  • http://www.shopexa.com Mike Marshall

    There’s a new shopping site called Shopexa.com, that uses Amazon’s technology, to enable their site to give money to charities of your choice everytime you use shop online through their site. I think this can really bring a lot of good to a lot of people.

  • http://mywhat.org/?p=4 My What? » Giving 2.0 Still Needs Some Tweaking

    [...] Life Dev has a link to changingthepresent.com, a social networking site that allows you to choose from a range of different charities and share your charitable activities with your friends. You can also set up registries for weddings, babies, your dearly departed, or for any other event. [...]

  • http://thdblog.wordpress.com/ AJB

    The concept of this is fantastic. What I don’t understand is how the dollar amount for a given charity is arrived upon? Is that by the non-profit or by ChangingThePresent?

    I question this because I looked at some of the charities in the health space and for example they say one place that cataract surgery in India costs $100 and in another it costs $60 (links at end of post). I have no idea where these numbers come from, but it has been well documented that cataract surgery in India costs closer to $25-30. Again, this is a great idea in theory, but there needs to be transparency in the process.

    http://www.changingthepresent.org/gifts/show/797
    http://www.changingthepresent.org/gifts/show/955

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