This week I wanted to share a couple of relatively painless ways to give to charity in the course of what you usually do online.

Igive.com is a site for online merchants to register and online shoppers to buy and have a percentage of their purchases donated to the charity of their choice. When you first register on the site, you choose what charity you would like for your purchases to go towards. Igive keeps great records, sends an e-mail when a check for my organization is sent, keeps a list of my orders so that I can track them and make sure the percentages were applied, and lets me print out a page for tax-deductions. They send out e-mails from time to time about which merchants are having special sales or promotions. There are a few merchants I shop from online anyway, so it is no problem to log into Igive first and shop from there (the links take you directly to the merchants’ sites, but you have to begin logged in at Igive for the purchase to register and for a donation to be made). Plus, any time I am looking to buy something online, I can look through the “mall” link at Igive and see if the new merchant I am wanting to buy from is registered there. I’ve used it for years and have been very pleased with it.

I’ve only recently heard of GoodSearch, but it is a search engine which uses funds generated from its advertisers for online donations to the charity of your choice. It is powered by Yahoo, so it should be as good as Yahoo is. You don’t have to register there: just put the name of the charity you are interested in in the “Who do you GoodSearch for?” window, click on “verify,” and then conduct your search. The site “remembers” that charity each time you search, but you can change it any time you want to. I just tried it to search for a product I was looking at earlier today through another search engine, and came up with multitudes of results. I e-mailed GoodSearch to ask if they had a list of the charities supported through them: they replied that they supported 20,000 non-profit organizations and didn’t have a good way to list them all, but users could put any charity in the appropriate window, and if it is not yet supported, they can click on the appropriate link to add it.

And that brings me to the other point I was going to make: I have seen various charities and non-profit organizations linked on various blogs. Perhaps you might want to look into adding your cause to one or both of these sites.

If you’d like to participate in either of these endeavors and don’t yet have a cause that you would be interested in, may I humbly suggest the Transverse Myelitis Association.

See Rocks In My Dryer for more real tips that really work for real people.