The Parish Church of St John-at-Hampstead

I’m writing to tell you all about an exciting way in which you can donate money to charity at no extra cost to yourself. Let me introduce you to The Giving Machine. If you regularly shop online using companies such as John Lewis, Amazon, eBay, Sainsbury’s (and thousands of others!) or send flowers or book holidays, you could actually start donating money to a charity of your choice at the same time. All it takes is a couple of extra “clicks”. Instead of going directly to the website you want to shop at, you type in www.thegivingmachine.co.uk. You can then browse through the shops by category if you’re not sure what you’re looking for, or you can type the shop’s name directly into the search bar. Next to the company’s name will be the amount (or percentage) that they will donate if you choose to shop with them. For example, Amazon will give up to 2.25% of whatever you spend directly to the charity via BACS payment. To make it even easier, The Giving Machine have created a downloadable Shop&Give reminder for your laptop or PC so that if you forget to go via The Giving Machine a little pop up will ask you if you would like to donate. (NB: This doesn’t work for every website but it does for the majority of them.)

You can choose from an endless list of charities but as we approach Christmas I would like to suggest that we focus our attention on CARIS Haringey. CARIS is registered with the giving machine and currently only has one person donating to them via The Giving Machine. This website could boost their donations by hundreds (and even thousands) of pounds if we all remember to click, shop and give. With Christmas approaching I know that many of us will be turning to the ease and convenience of online shopping in order to avoid the shops – wouldn’t it be amazing if we could donate to homeless families whilst doing so?

There will be leaflets available at church with instructions but if you have any trouble using the website or would like me to show you how, please email me at [email protected]