David R. MacIver's Blog: Charitable donations

Charitable donations

15 May 2016

I have never signed the Giving What We Can pledge, despite a long running nagging feeling that I should. This is because reasons.

I’m still not going to sign it (for now), but I’m going to start making up for my charitable deficiencies as an individual by sorting out my act through my company (I currently operate through my own limited company).

I’ve been putting this off until my business bank account was a bit more liquid, but now it is so it’s time to act.

So, starting from this point, 10% of all my limited company’s revenue will go to charity. To more or less backdate this for invoices I’ve issued so far, I’m going to be donating £1000 pounds to charity immediately (or, rather, as soon as the charities I’ve chosen get back to me RE how they want me to handle corporate donations, but I’ve emailed them already).

I am still vacillating somewhat on exactly what charities to donate to, but I’ve decided to go with an initial position that I am pretty confident in and adjust later as I refine my thoughts: I’ll be donating in a 50/50 split between Give Directly and Cool Earth. Each will definitely get £500 of that initial donation, and until I come up with a better plan will get 5% each of my revenue.

I’m also considering:

Donating to the Against Malaria Foundation. At present if I do this the most likely scenario is a 50/30/20 split Cool Earth/Give Directly/Against Malaria Foundation (I am aware that this is the direct opposite order to what Give Well would recommend. Again, reasons. Maybe even good ones).
Finding some good political change organisations to donate to. Recommendations welcome.
Investing in renewable energy funds. Note: This requires me to do a lot of investigation of how this sort of thing works as a corporation, so I’m probably not going to do it any time soon.
Offering clients some sort of matching scheme for up to an additional 10%.
Additionally donating money to open source organisations such as the Python Software Foundation. If I do this it would not come out of the 10%.

Comments

You’re now all on commission | David R. MacIver on 2016-05-20 12:56:01:

[…] this nor the 10% of each invoice that I donate to charity come out of each other. You get 20%, charity gets 10%, I get […]