Hi all!
I am happy to announce that we are introducing donation gift vouchers (German: Spendengutscheine) at Effektiv Spenden for this giving season! It's a great way to get friends and family thinking about Effective Giving - because the voucher recipient decides which of our recommended charities the donation will go to!
The vouchers work like this:
- You buy a voucher via our website: https://effektiv-spenden.org/spendengutschein/ (The page is in german, but you can toggle the linked form to english.)
- After completing payment, you receive a voucher code by email and forward it to the recipient.
- The recipient redeems it via our website and gets to choose which of our recommended charities the donation will go to.
Main goals
Effective Giving Promotion: The vouchers can help introduce and discuss the principles of Effective Giving with family and friends.
Corporate Engagement: We also offer voucher purchase in bulk for organizations that want to send out gifts to their employees, clients, or business partners. See https://effektiv-spenden.org/spendengutschein-unternehmen/
Tax Deductibility in Germany and Switzerland: From a tax perspective the donation comes from the voucher buyer, so German and Swiss nationals benefit from the tax deductibility of voucher purchases like with regular donations. (If you reside in a different country this might not be possible.)
Feedback
If you have any bug reports, questions, or feedback about the product, let me know in the comments or via tilman.masur@effektiv-spenden.org.
Happy giving!
Tilman
Treasury just came out with proposed regulations defining a DAF -- and I must say, I find them pretty badly done for something that has been in the works for seventeen years!
The temporal difference could be outcome-determinative here. But I'm having a hard time distinguishing gift cards from allowing the donor to amend a recommendation (e.g., the intervention was proven ineffective after the donation but before the disbursement) or to supply one if originally omitted (e.g., I forgot to fill out GiveWell's allocation form prior to sending a check or authorizing an ACH).
I don't think it's inherent to a DAF that the regrant is unrestricted to specific purposes or that the donor's options for a recommendation are pretty wide open. The statute and proposed regs tell us that an org that regrants to only a single identified organization that meets certain criteria isn't a DAF, which suggests that an org that regrants to two or more could be.
One plausible reading of the proposed regs would be that any regranting organization that allowed donors to change recommendations, or consulted donors post-donation to the extent that consultation would rise to the level of "advisory privileges," would be a DAF.
In other words, if a gap in time between donation and recommendation makes a regranting organization a DAF, then a lot of regranting orgs may need to tighten up their policies and practices if they don't want to be a DAF. I'm not sure whether to blame Treasury or Congress more for this mess.