Want to Donate? All You Need to Do Is Tap Your Finger

People are constantly on their phones, but now, downloading an app might actually be justified.
With Cause Tap, every time you put a new app (free or paid) on your device, a donation goes towards a worthy organization. And while this may sound too good to be true, it’s not.
To participate, simply install the Cause Tap app, which is free to download from the Google Play store and choose a cause. Then anytime you download a new app, its manufacturer makes a donation on your behalf (at no cost to you), reports Cause Artist. You can then spread impact by connecting with friends and inviting them to support your cause.
The founders of Cause Tap refer to themselves as “marketing and technology industry veterans with a conscience” on their website.  As a result, the group makes all of their processes transparent, so users can track exactly where money is being sent and how it is being used.
“We wanted to create an app that would be accessible to people who don’t necessarily have the time or financial means to support causes,” co-founder Andrea Nylund tells Cause Artist. “CauseTap empowers individuals while providing nonprofits with a new way to grow their support base and apps a new channel for engaging users.
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5 Things to Know Before You Give

There are more than two million nonprofits operating in the United States — roughly one for every 135 Americans. As the season of giving ramps up, how can you feel confident that your dollars will be spent responsibly? “If you find yourself considering a gift to charity that called you on the phone, you’ve already lost most of the battle to do as much good as possible,” writes Elie Hassenfeld, co-founder and co-executive director of GiveWell, an organization that highlights a few of the most effective nonprofits. “If you wait for charities to come to you, you’re just rewarding the ones that are most aggressive — not the ones that do the most good.” Read on to learn how you can avoid donor’s remorse.
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Finally, a One-Stop Shop for Charity Research

Not all charities are created equal. That became abundantly clear for reporters at the Tampa Bay Times, who spent the better part of the past year investigating “America’s Worst Charities” in partnership with The Center for Investigative Reporting. So at the behest of readers, who expressed overwhelming concern about where their charitable donations were going, the Times and the CIR teamed up to create an online tool that makes charity research a little easier. Charity Checker is the first website that aggregates ratings and reviews from some of the most prominent online watchdogs — BBB Wise Giving Alliance, CharityNavigator, GreatNonprofits and GuideStar — and publishes the results in one place. While not every one of the 1.6 million charities in the U.S. are included, most of America’s largest and most popular causes are covered, giving citizens a starting point for making informed decisions about how to donate their money.
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In today’s connected world, it’s too easy to be duped by charities that actually do very little to help the causes they claim to support. “We learned that it’s sometimes extremely difficult to tell the good charities from the bad,” Chris Davis, investigations editor for the Tampa Bay Times, wrote in a piece introducing Charity Checker. “Some of the nation’s most wasteful charities pick names that mimic popular organizations. Others use accounting gimmicks to overstate the good they’re doing.”
So how can you prevent giving to fraudulent causes? One way is through research, although, many citizens don’t have the time to spend hours pouring over an organization’s financial statements or investigating a charity’s board members, nor do they know what red flags to look for. Charity Checker does some of the work for you, by posting a “Donor Advisory” on charities that are flagged in negative news stories or are on the Times-CIR list of the 50 Worst Charities. Users can also click through from Charity Checker to original data sources to read more in-depth analyses from watchdog groups, or contribute their own experiences on GreatNonprofits to help shift the conversation. It may not be perfect, but Charity Checker is an easy-to-use tool that was a long-time coming. Hopefully, the more people use it to research the causes they want to support, the easier it will be to direct your dollars to the causes you care about.
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