How It Works

Table of Contents

Opportunity, Precedents and Constraints

ChangingThePresent helps nonprofits raise awareness and money by making charitable giving more rewarding, convenient and cost-efficient than ever before. Visitors can choose not just what nonprofit they want to support, but also exactly what they want to accomplish to make the world a better place.

Today, visitors can preserve an acre of the rainforest; provide a child with her first book; fund an hour of cancer research; sponsor cataract surgery to restore a blind person’s sight; or fund computers for schools, meals for homebound elderly, video cameras for human rights activists, etc.

Register for a Premium Profile, and visitors will also be able to fund the donation opportunities that you offer.

Channeling Gift Money to Nonprofits

ChangingThePresent helps channel to nonprofits some of the $250 billion per year that people in the United States spend each year on birthday, wedding and holiday gifts. The media has reported on the growing popularity of donation gifts, that is, charitable donations made in a friend's name in lieu of giving a traditional present. After all, how many of us need another pair of fuzzy slippers?

ChangingThePresent provides all the elements necessary to facilitate donation gifts:

• Discrete donation opportunities feel more like a gift.
• Wish lists and registries let members share their passions and ensure the perfect gift.
• Greeting cards include a personal message, along with a photo and description of the donation gift you give.

ChangingThePresent does more than facilitate donation gifts; it also promotes this as a social norm.

Facebook™

ChangingThePresent also helps nonprofits raise money through ™. Every day, thousands of facebook™ members spend real money to connect with friends by sending $1 virtual gifts to one another: a picture of a balloon, a coffee cup, or whatever.

ChangingThePresent offers an exciting new alternative to these virtual gifts. Now, facebook members can send gifts that also make the world a better place. ChangingThePresent’s $1 gifts on facebook are actually donations, and the pictures that friends receive show what you did in their names to make a difference.

Convenience

ChangingThePresent.org makes giving as easy as shopping online.

Social Networking

ChangingThePresent.org also uses a social networking approach with wish lists, blogs, profiles, and registries, so that giving becomes more than a transaction; it becomes a way to share your values and interests with others.

Not Just for Gift-Givers

People are using ChangingThePresent.org for more than alternative gifts. It is also a convenient and rewarding channel for their regular charitable giving. Donors can see exactly what they’re accomplishing; can donate to as many nonprofits as they wish with a single credit card transaction; and can view all of their receipts in one place.

ChangingThePresent.org is an arena for learning and discovery, as well as for giving, and even those who do not give through ChangingThePresent.org are likely to remember what they see and learn on the site.

Raising Awareness

We want to raise awareness, as well as dollars. We seek to increase understanding of important causes, thereby encouraging giving and enabling donors to make more effective and strategic charitable giving decisions.

Volunteers

In addition to contributing, visitors can find volunteer opportunities.

Types of Nonprofit Profiles

Basic Profiles

Visitors can search by name to find any nonprofit that appears in the ERI database (generally, that is every public charity that files a tax return). Initially, those nonprofits appear with a Basic Profile displaying only their name, address, and EIN. All Basic Profiles also include a Donate Now section for fundraising. All information on Basic Profiles comes directly from the ERI database and can only be edited by signing up for a Premium Profile.

Premium Profiles

Nonprofits that appear in the ERI database can upgrade to a Premium Profile, which provides the following exposure on ChangingThePresent.org:

• Pages displaying information about the organization, a logo, and three photo; and
• A page for 12 donation gifts, each with a title, description, photo and price.
• Personalized fundraising banners and drives.
• Elevated status in the website's nonprofit search feature.

Facebook Profiles

Nonprofits with Premium Profiles also appear in our fundraising application on facebook, which can be seen at: apps.facebook.com/changingthepresent. This application let's you take advantage of facebook's popularity to raise awareness of your organization and offer $1 gifts.

Pricing of Profiles

Basic Profiles are free, but cannot be personalized.

Premium Profiles are $100 per year, and allow you to personalize your nonprofit profile and offer donation gifts, as well as offering many other fundraising tools.

Nonprofit Entry in ChangingThePresent

Your organization and donation gifts may also appear in other places throughout the website, such as member and advisor profile pages, wish lists and registries.

Featured Gifts

Visitors can browse by cause to find Featured Gifts, which were selected in consultation with the ImportantGifts Board of Advisors, aided by a selected group of other experts and our own researchers. We nominated and reviewed more than 1,000 nonprofits addressing 33 causes in order to choose which nonprofits to initially invite to submit Premium Profiles with Featured Gifts. These nonprofits were chosen based on the following criteria:

• A clear mission, vision, and sustainability strategy;
• A replicable model that could effect systemic change;
• Measurable goals and outcomes consistent with their mission;
• Transparency and a commitment to accountability to stakeholders;
• 501(c)(3) status or equivalent, for international organizations;
• A mix of international institutions or programs, along with U.S.-based ones
• A mix of large and well known organizations with others that are smaller or less well known;
• A balanced approach to issues, geographical ranges, and goods or services provided.

At our discretion, compelling donation opportunities displayed on Premium Profiles may appear on the Featured Gifts pages, but nonprofits should not expect to appear there.

Promoting Your Presence on ChangingThePresent.org

People in the United States spend significantly more on presents than they donate to nonprofits. ChangingThePresent.org helps your organization capture some of that gift money, including the money spent by your supporters and the money that others spend buying presents for your supporters. The best way to capture some of that money is by inviting your members to give your donation items in lieu of traditional presents and to add your items to their wish lists and registries, so their friends will know they would appreciate a donation gift benefiting your organization. We encourage you to invite your members and we will provide tools to make it easy, but you are not obligated to do so.

We are also promoting ChangingThePresent.org to draw traffic to the website.

Financial Aspects of ChangingThePresent.org

Online Donations

As is typical of online donation portals, visitors to the website and to our facebook™ application make credit card donations to ImportantGifts, Inc., a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, which provides them with a receipt. Donors can choose nonprofits to support or can choose specific donation gift items.

Sub-grants to Nonprofits

ImportantGifts, Inc. makes sub-grants to nonprofits at the end of the month following the donation. Please see the more detailed description in the User Agreement. The sub-grant is equal to the full amount of the online donations, less only a transaction fee of 3% plus 30 cents per donation item, primarily to cover the costs we incur in processing the credit card transactions.

Sustainability

ChangingThePresent.org will be supported primarily by corporate and foundation sponsors, by individual donors, and by small fees for listings.

Financial Reporting

Nonprofits can view financial reports online and can see the particular donation items selected by donors. Annual audited ImportantGifts, Inc. financial statements will be available to the public.

Identifying Donors

ChangingThePresent.org collects contact information from all donors. We encourage them to have us share that information with the nonprofits they choose to support, but we allow them the option of retaining their privacy if they do not welcome further solicitations. Nonprofits can view online reports of donor information for donors who allow us to pass it along.

About Donation Opportunities

ChangingThePresent.org focuses on tangible donation opportunities, which donors generally find more rewarding, and which are more likely to appeal as alternative birthday, wedding and holiday gifts. Tangible donation opportunities are those that fund a specific item or service, such as one book for a child, 100 vaccines, or an hour of cancer research. Broader donations to programs are not tangible.

Defining Donation Gifts

We recognize that some nonprofits do not provide discrete goods or services. Even they, however, can typically define some unit cost that they incur. For instance, a donor could fund an hour of a cancer researcher's time, the production of 10,000 pamphlets for an outreach campaign, or the broadcasting of a program on public radio. Visitors can also make a general donation to the organization, without specifying the use, for whatever amount they wish.

Nonprofit Donation Opportunities

Guidelines for pricing donation gifts:

• All donation items must be goods or services or costs that are currently part of your program, and that you intend to continue.
• If you cease providing the goods or services or otherwise know that you cannot spend in that way at least as much as you raise from ChangingThePresent.org, you must deactivate the item on ChangingThePresent.org.
• The description and photo must accurately reflect what you are doing
• The price must reflect the cost of providing that good or service, including the 3% plus 30 cents transaction fee from ChangingThePresent.org and ancillary direct costs (but not unallocated general overhead).
• You may offer the same donation opportunity on your website or other donation portals, provided, however, that you may not offer these items at a lower net price (net of transaction fees) than you list on ChangingThePresent.org.
  * You will endeavor to use donations you receive from ChangingThePresent.org in accordance with the directions of the donors. You may use those ChangingThePresent.org donations to provide additional such goods and services. Alternatively, since we do not seek to control how you spend other funds, you may shift that amount of other funds from these uses to others. If you planned on spending $100,000 for books for children and raise $10,000 through ChangingThePresent.org for that purpose, you may elect to spend $100,000 for books or you may shift up to $10,000 of funds you would have used for that purpose to other uses. We want only to try to avoid a situation wherein you spend less in total for a good or service than you raise for that purpose through ChangingThePresent.org. Of course, we recognize that needs change, so if, for instance, polio is eliminated, nobody will insist you spend the money on vaccines that are no longer required. We also realize that there is sometimes a lag between the time of donations and the time the money can be spent.

About ImportantGifts

ImportantGifts, Inc., is a nonprofit organization dedicated to providing nonprofit organizations with significant new financial and human resources.

ImportantGifts seeks to:

• Encourage philanthropic giving;
• Reduce the cost of nonprofit fundraising; and;
• Provide nonprofits with better online tools for attracting and engaging members and for raising money.

Board of Directors

The current Board of Directors of ImportantGifts is listed here.

Board of Advisors

The ImportantGifts Board of Advisors includes more than 160 prominent leaders from the social sector and from the fields of the internet and marketing. You can view the full list here.