That Spare Change You Donate At Checkout Is Adding Up To Millions For Charities

So-called point-of-sale donations have sharply increased in recent years, bringing in hundreds of millions of dollars a year. But the requests to "round up" your bill for charity have really taken off.In these challenging times, the need for reliable local reporting has never been greater. Put a value on the impact of our year-round coverage. Help us continue to highlight LA stories, hold the powerful accountable, and amplify community voices.

Much of that growth is fueled by customer generosity, but those who study consumer behavior point to other factors, too, including how we think about money and even our unconscious feelings of guilt.Michael Rindos says he"almost always" taps the donate button on the credit/debit card reader, or PIN pad. But lately, that's been changing.

The results after the switch were"mind-blowing" she says: The foundation roughly doubled what it had been raising, which averaged between $11 million and $14 million annually, but hit more than $20 million in 2019. The change was so successful, the foundation decided to permanently adopt the new strategy."The number of regular customers who donate every time and round up every time — it's really inspiring," Bradbury says.

"It's like an effort-reduction strategy whereby people are better at and intuitively prefer to deal with round numbers," Silver says."That manifests in how much you want to pay and how much you want to buy." But Cait Lamberton, a professor of marketing at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School, cautions that there's a potential downside to all of this. Customers, she says, may feel manipulated and could end up"feeling resentful toward the source of the manipulation" — the retailer doing the collecting.Paula Nichols says she never taps"Yes" on the PIN pad when it prompts her to round up her bill.

"Consumers deserve — and state attorneys general require — transparency and assurance that the donations go where they are advertised and intended," McCarthy says.

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