Amazon Ends Its Charity Donation Program Amazonsmile After Other Cost-Cutting Efforts

Amazon is ending its charity donation program by Feb. 20, the company announced Wednesday. The move to shutter AmazonSmile comes after a series of other cost-cutting measures. Amazon Ends Its Charity Donation Program Amazonsmile After Other Cost-Cutting Efforts

Through the program, which has been in operation since 2013, Amazon donates 0.5% of eligible purchases to a charity of the shopper’s choice. The program has donated over $400 million to U.S. charities and more than $449 million globally, according to Amazon.

“With so many eligible organizations — more than one million globally — our ability to have an impact was often spread too thin,” Amazon said in a letter to customers.

In 2022, AmazonSmile’s average donation per charity was $230 in the U.S., an Amazon spokesperson told NPR in an email.

However, some organizations — especially small ones — say the donations were incredibly helpful to them. And many shoppers who use AmazonSmile have expressed their dismay on social media and shared the impact the program has had on the charities they support.

The Squirrelwood Equine Sanctuary, an animal sanctuary in New York’s Hudson Valley that is home to more than 40 horses and other farm animals, tweeted that the nearly $9,400 it has received from Amazon Smile “made a huge difference to us.”

Beth Hyman, executive director of the sanctuary, says the organization reliably received a couple thousand dollars per quarter. While that’s a relatively small amount of the overall budget, “that can feed an animal for a year,” Hyman says. “That’s a life that hangs in the balance,” she adds, that the sanctuary may not be able to support going forward.

Hyman says Amazon gave virtually no notice that AmazonSmile was going to end and that Amazon made it difficult for the program to succeed because they “hid it behind another URL, and they never integrated it into their mobile apps.”

Court Appointed Special Advocates (CASA) of Central Texas, an organization that trains volunteers to advocate for children in the child welfare system in four counties between Austin and San Antonio, was another nonprofit that shoppers on AmazonSmile could support.

Eloise Hudson, the group’s communications manager, says that while CASA is a national organization, it’s broken down into individual, local nonprofits that work and seek funding at the grassroots level. AmazonSmile empowered people in supporting a small charity, she says, and “that’s not going to be there anymore.”

Amazon said it will help charities transition by “providing them with a one-time donation equivalent to three months of what they earned in 2022 through the program” and allowing them to continue receiving donations until the program’s official end in February.

After that, shoppers can still support charities by buying items off their wish lists, the company said, adding that it will continue to support other programs such as affordable housing programs, food banks and disaster relief.

Amazon had previously announced its Housing Equity Fund to invest in affordable housing, which is focused on areas where its headquarters have disrupted housing markets. Some of the programs listed in the announcement are internal to Amazon.

At the beginning of January, Amazon’s CEO Andy Jassy announced 18,000 layoffs, the largest in the company’s history and the single largest number of jobs cut at a technology company since the industry downturn that began last year.

Amazon Claims The $400 Million Amazon Smiles Users Donated Wasn’t Impactful—Sparking Backlash

Amazon Ends Its Charity Donation Program Amazonsmile After Other Cost-Cutting Efforts

Small local charities are worried about losing funding as Amazon pivots to large-scale corporate charity projects.

For almost 10 years, Amazon Smile has allowed customers to make charitable donations while shopping at Amazon. The service benefited a wide range of organizations, but this week Amazon announced that Smile will be discontinued in February. The reasons for this are already being criticized online.

According to Amazon’s statement, “the program has not grown to create the impact that we had originally hoped.” Noting that Smile involved more than 1 million organizations, Amazon said that “our ability to have an impact was often spread too thin.”

When people shop through Smile, Amazon automatically donates 0.5% of the price to the customer’s charity of choice. However, Amazon said it isn’t happy with the results, and will now switch focus to its own corporate philanthropy projects, including disaster relief and affordable housing.

Once the service shuts down, Amazon will give Smile charities “a one-time donation equivalent to three months of what they earned in 2022.” Then the charities have to figure out how to pick up the slack, with Amazon suggesting that they set up Amazon wishlists instead. Unsurprisingly, this isn’t going down well with Amazon Smile users.

People are questioning the idea that Smile had a disappointing “impact,” because in material terms this just isn’t true. Over the past decade, the platform has reportedly processed more than $400 million in donations.

I should have known that #AmazonSmile was too good for this world.

“…the program has not grown to create the impact that we had originally hoped.”

Sure as hell looks like it made an impact to me. pic.twitter.com/mnRuXtEmJJ

— Boter Bug (@BoterBug) January 19, 2023

Anyone else LIVID that Amazon is getting rid of AmazonSmile as of February 20? Like, I know many local organizations that saw and felt those benefits of .5% of spending. #AmazonSmile

— christine anne – tiny fiery human tamer (@christinepeirce) January 19, 2023

Amazon claims the Amazon Smile program didn’t have an impact. I can tell you as an animal not for profit it made a huge difference to us. That $9400 meant the world. That isn’t nothing to us. #amazonsmile #amazon @amazonsmile pic.twitter.com/O67cPhQ3rV

Like Amazon’s main retail service, Smile is popular due to its efficiency and ease of use. It isn’t entirely scandal-free—for instance, some anti-vax organizations allegedly raised money through Smile—but overall it’s a good system for an “every little helps” attitude to donation. It’s completely different from traditional corporate philanthropy, where companies create and/or partner with large-scale projects with no input from customers.

Judging by the criticism on Twitter today, people are particularly concerned about how Smile’s demise may harm smaller organizations like local schools and animal sanctuaries. There’s also a lot of pushback against the idea that Smile didn’t have an adequate impact, tying in with long-running critiques of corporate charity work.

Amazon obviously struggles with negative press and many big businesses use charity work to boost their public image. So it’s possible that Smile’s disappointing “impact” has less to do with how much it helped charities and more to do with how much it helped Amazon itself.

Incremental donations to small organizations are less headline-grabbing than, say, Amazon spearheading a $2 billion affordable housing initiative under its own public brand.

Amazon Ends Its Charity Donation Program Amazonsmile After Other Cost-Cutting Efforts

Related Articles:

Vast Troves of Classified Info Undermine National Security, Spy Chief Says

Your Questions And Comments Are Greatly Appreciated.

Monty H. & Carolyn A.

Leave a Reply Cancel reply