Ask HN: How to Donate to Charity Through API

5 points by rustyfe 10 years ago | 4 comments

Does anyone know of a good service or plan of attack for donating to charity through a REST API?

I'm writing an Amazon Lambda job that will run every week, check how days that week I committed to GitHub, and charge me money if I'm not keeping up with my goal. I could just have it send me angry emails or something, but I think having real money on the line will keep me motivated.

I don't want to have money go to waste or anything, so I think a nice use of it would be to give it to a charity. However, I haven't yet found an easy way to go about this. Has anyone faced a similar challenge and found a good solution? Most everything I've found is about solutions for the charities themselves, which isn't what I'm going for.

chadkruse 10 years ago |

You might be able to pull off the payments side using cryptocurrencies. Check out the CharityCoin directory for Bitcoin addresses: https://github.com/charitycoin/directory. You also might want to check in with the Stellar folks (http://slack.stellar.org/). They're working on some cool international projects dealing with financial inclusion, though there's a good chance you'll have to build the necessary connections to the Stellar network yourself.

rustyfe 10 years ago | |

The problem here is that I'll have to fill up a wallet with Bitcoin now, and then pay them later. That takes away the sting of, "Wow, being lazy cost me money". Still, right now, this is the one of the best ideas I've found. Paypal has a Payments API, and I can pay charities through it, but it's not a very good API, and it really seems like it'll be painful.

You'd think it would be easier to give money away!

rendx 10 years ago |

Why don't you simply pick a bunch of charities you like and donate to them? I don't think spreading it thin across too many organizations makes a lot of sense. Even if you were to donate $100k per year, why not make it $100k to one project you really like?

rustyfe 10 years ago | |

I was planning to just pay one. But, I need an easy way to do it. Sure I could just send myself an email with the details and do it manually, but, then again, I could have done this whole thing manually!