Sunday Spotlight: Penny For Your World

A penny is often regarded as a useless coin that simply weighs down our purses and takes up space in our wallet. We find them on the ground and consider them tokens of luck not units of money. So what can one penny do you ask? The folks over at Penny For Your World are pretty sure they can change lives. Their goal is to prove that it is feasible for EVERYONE to make a difference and if enough people are willing to try, lives will be changed. For just $3.65 you will have the opportunity to help 365 different charities, 365 days out of the year. Your penny will go to charities like CARE or Foundation for Children with Cancer- the choice is up to you. The organization is just getting started and needs your support to grow and to help more charities. Visit them on Facebook and share them with your friends. For less than a latte, you can help people all year long. Who can say no to that? One penny may not make a difference alone but if you are willing, your voice will help collect other pennies and the impact could be huge. It is about a collective effort and a willingness to do something, even if it is small, to give back.

If you really want to splurge you can also pledge a dime each day for a total of $36.50 for the year. Imagine if it were always so easy to multiply your impact by ten!

Perhaps the best part of the whole process is the fact that everyday for an entire year you will get the opportunity to learn about two different charities that you may have never heard of otherwise. That’s right- each morning conveniently located in your email inbox will be a description of two organizations and you simply click which one you want to give to.  I won’t lie I had to bust out the calculator- that is 730 charities that you will be exposed to in one year. If you choose to give more to a specific one or perhaps have the opportunity to get involved further by volunteering that is just an added bonus. Pretty amazing what a penny can do, right? What are you doing with your pennies? For a year- mine just went to helping others.

*You could consider this as a favor option for your guests. At your wedding or before, if your guests are so inclined, they could fill out a slip with their email address and you could register them. Each morning they will get the chance to decide which charity they want to give to thanks to you. A wedding favor that lasts a whole year and may inspire others to give back sounds pretty awesome to me!

I asked the philanthropically innovative Sean Quinn- who is the co-founder of Penny for Your World to share a bit about what they were trying to achieve and where they want to see this go. Here’s what he had to say:

The idea for Penny For Your World came from thinking about Facebook‘s huge user base and that if each member would only give a penny a day how huge an impact that could have on the world. At first we attempted to create a social network where you could travel around a world map,  “friend” charities working in different countries for minimum a penny a month, and see where your friends are giving. You could win awards for being the top donor in a specific country, and it would track your recruits so you could see your impact.

We quickly realized that we were launching with a product that was too complicated with too many features to achieve what we wanted – lots of people giving microdonations. So we made a big pivot and stripped it down to its core.

We believe that if giving back were easy, everyone would do it. But that there’s three big factors that hold people up from getting involved in charitable giving: 1. There’s too many options. 2. Too little time to research those options properly. and 3. Too little money to give a miminum donation of $25 to a cause we haven’t had the time to research.

We think Penny For Your World solves these hangups by giving the user only two options of charities per day, making it a one-click from a daily email to donate, and lowering the minimum donation to a penny for each cause.

We opened a couple of weeks ago, so as you can imagine our daily donation pool is not yet significant. This is a concept that will really be beneficial to the charities involved when we have a large user base so the value of the daily donation is significant enough to impact the two profiled charities.

Where we see it going? You tell us. We stripped it down to the minimum product so we can hear from donors what they’d like to see on Penny and build features around user feedback.

Ok- friends go sign up and start giving your pennies!