SwipeGood takes the hassle out of donating

The startup allows users to make small donations with each purchase

One of the most awkward situations, in my opinion, is when you’re walking out of a grocery store with a cart full of groceries and someone asks you if you want to donate to charity X.  Your mind is automatically programmed to say “no,” but you know you’re going to look like a jerk if you’re standing there with $150 worth of groceries and you can’t spare $10 for a homeless shelter.  (Personally, I have no problem with throwing money at people; I have a problem with people stopping me in front of the grocery store.  I am on a tight schedule, I don’t have time for chitchat!)

A charity-minded startup, SwipeGood.com, launched Friday to make charitable donations quicker, easier, and less awkward.  The idea behind SwipeGood is simple and brilliant: by simply going onto the website, you can enter your banking and/or credit card information, so that with every purchase you make, your transaction is rounded up to the nearest dollar amount and the extra change goes to a charity of your choice.  The concept is similar to Bank of America’s Keep the Change program, which allows banking customers to round up their transactions and transfer the extra change to their savings accounts. 

Web users have several different giving options available to them: a new member can enter their credit card information or their banking information, although, as of yet, SwipeGood only supports American Express Online.  The company is working on partnering with different banks, such as Bank of America and Chase.  Additionally, the company has partnered with Blippy to allow users to donate based on purchases that they share on Blippy.

The site has been in private beta mode for the last month while the team, consisting of co-founders Anthony Nemitz, Thomas Steinacher, and Steli Efti, studied the spending habits of users.  The average user makes somewhere around 40 transactions per month with a typical round-up amount of $0.50.  Over the course of one month, this amount adds up to $20.  “Taking these numbers into consideration, it will only take 4,000 users to drive $1 million in donations per year,” said Anthony Nemitz in the company’s announcement.

“With 10 million users we can raise $2 billion for charity every year,” added Thomas Steinacher.  “That’s enough to educate 225,000 kids or purchase 50,000,000 textbooks per year! The potential impact of SwipeGood is massive.”

Presently, DonorsChoose.org, a charity that works with public schools, is the only charity that the site supports, but the team plans to add more as the site gains momentum.  “We've had the pleasure of working very closely with DonorsChoose.org and there are a number of great charities who are excited about SwipeGood and we are currently in the process of determining next month's featured cause.  Part of this process is to understand how donors respond to the concept and to the rotational nature of featured charities,” said Nemitz via email.

Formerly a software engineer and product manager at eBay, Anthony Nemitz came up with the original idea for SwipeGood, which is a for-profit and makes money by taking a 5% cut of each monthly donation.  Thomas Steinacher, winner of European Contest for Young Scientists for his work with multi-touch visualization, and Steli Efti, CEO and founder of online education platform Supercool School, round out the all-star team.

The startup is currently raising a round of seed funding right now, “with some really exciting commitments already,” said Nemitz. 

SwipeGood from SwipeGood on Vimeo.