You are not the only one to think of this. There's already a site that does this. A few, in fact.

http://www.charitygiftcertificates.org/
http://www.justgive.org/give-now/gift-cards/index.jsp

I think it's a great idea, in theory. A little bit like what the The United Way does already but they don't have the gift card aspect. but I know with a lot of the charity donation sites, like Heifer International, the amount to buy an animal can be up there. A charity gift card is a good way to still give to charity but also give within your means.

My main concern in an idea like this is keeping costs down. Probably the charities would need to have an agreement with this charity for it to work, so the charities involved would be somewhat limited at first. Then there's the costs of operating a Web site and server space. Also the transaction fees to 1. buy the gift card and 2. redeem the gift card. It is introducing a middleman. But if the middleman can leverage the power of group charity, like the United Way does, it could work out well.

I compared the traffic on those charity sites using Alexa, and Just Give and United Way are comparable in web traffic. So it looks like Just Give's doing a fairly decent job in terms of getting people to their site.

I think it's an awesome concept-just trying to be realistic in some possible hurdles.
Source(s):
http://www.charitygiftcertificates.org/
http://www.justgive.org/give-now/gift-cards/index.jsp
http://www.alexa.com/
http://www.mahalo.com/The_United_Way

https://www.paypal.com/us/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_display-receiving-fees-outsid...

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