Update 18 Dec 2019
Poll has finished and we have 767 unique commenters in the comment section of this post. That means an extra $7,670 going to the donation — making the total $32,670. I will be distributing this to the top 6 charities voted by the community ($5,445 each), which would be
- NSW Rural Fire Service
- beyondblue
- Cancer Council
- RSPCA Australia
- Salvation Army
- Kids With Cancer Foundation Australia
I'll try to all that organised before Christmas. Thanks to all who have voted and commented!
Hi everyone! It's something that we have been doing for almost 8 years. Every June and December OzBargain will donate to charities that our community members suggested and voted for. We've donated more than $260,000 to charities around Australia over the years, and for this Christmas I have set aside $25,000 to the top 5 charities. Moreover, for every unique commenter in this thread, we will be donating an extra $10!
Update: We have reached 50 suggestions so we won't take any more. However you can still vote and comment.
The workflow will be similar to last year's:
Check whether your favourite charity has already been suggested (they should be alphabetically sorted under Poll Options). If it has, vote it up! Otherwise you can suggest it by posting a top-level comment (i.e. not replying existing comments)
If you are suggesting a charity, please provide a link & 1 or 2 sentence telling us what the charity does. It would greatly help other OzBargainers making decisions.
Even if your preferred charity has been suggested, leave a comment and let us know! Remember every unique commenter on this thread will add an extra $10 to the donation.
The poll will run for 7 days. After the poll expires, votes will be revealed and the top 5 charities will be sharing the pool of donation of AUD $25,000 + $10 x number of unique commenters. For example if 500 OzBargainers commented in this thread, we will evenly distribute $30,000 to the chosen charities.
I am also putting a cap of maximum 1,000 commenters, making the cap of the donation at $35,000. If we can reach that level the donation will be shared with top 7 charities from the poll (still at $5,000 each).
Which charity should I suggest?
It must be a registered charity eligible for DGR (deductible gift recipient). That would unfortunately make NPOs like Wikipedia & Sea Shepherd ineligible.
As we are OzBargain, it would be great if the charity is Australia based or benefits Australians.
There are many worthy charities. However as it's for Christmas this year, let's prioritise on charities working on social welfare.
I will also close the suggestion feature after we have reached 50 charities.
To get started, I have included top 10 most voted charities from last year's poll. Suggestion & commenting starts today (11 Dec) and will close at 12PM on Tuesday 18 Dec. I will then work out the total amount of donation we will send to the charities, and hopefully get all the donations made by Christmas 2019.
Other Frequently Asked Questions
Some questions seem to get asked every year…
Q: Can we get a detailed information about each charity, i.e. the percentage of the donation that actually gets to the cause?
A: See this comment by toniyellow, ChangePath lists out charities with how they score in Transparency, Financial Sustainability and Privacy. Thanks also to psyren89. You can search on ACNC on how charities distribute their funding.
Q: I made a suggestion in my comment but it did not show up in the poll?!
A: All new suggestions have to be manually approved by the moderators, and depending on the time of the day there might be some delay.
Poll has finished and we have 767 unique commenters in the comment section of this post. That means an extra $7,670 going to the donation — making the total $32,670. I will be distributing this to the top 6 charities voted by the community ($5,445 each), which would be
I'll try to all that organised before Christmas. Thanks to all who have voted and commented!
I suggested the NSW RFS in 2016 "https://www.ozbargain.com.au/node/282403?page=2#comment-4277970" but there wasn't much support back then.
Amazing what a few more days of smoke in the air does to raise the profile of these hard workers (often volunteers).
Well done and Merry Christmas to all.