What’s the Best Way to Donate to Charity If You Don’t Have a Lot to Give?

My Two Cents Updated Dec. 22, 2020  By Charlotte Cowles

Every holiday season, my mailbox bursts with mail from every organization I’ve ever donated money to — along with some I’ve never even heard of. Each letter is its own guilt trip, emblazoned with homeless polar bears and burning trees, and I always feel bad throwing them out. (Which is the intention — and research shows it works: 30 percent of all annual giving occurs in December.) I understand the message — if I was able to give money to these organizations in the past, couldn’t I scrounge up a few bucks again, especially at the end of this hellish year?

While I’ve certainly made my share of random donations, I’m trying to be more strategic these days. According to Debra Mesch, the director of the Women’s Philanthropy Institute at Indiana University, my previous tendencies to make small, spontaneous donations without any long-term vision is very common, but not always constructive.

It’s also more typical among women — we give money more often than men, but we tend to sprinkle it around, and in lower amounts. “Women often don’t even realize how much they’ve spent on philanthropic causes,” Mesch told me. “A friend will say, ‘Oh, I’m running in this marathon for breast cancer, can you give $50?’ Men don’t do that as much, but women want to support their friends. So they spread out their giving.”

There’s nothing intrinsically wrong with this tactic — by all means, give money to your friends’ causes. And it’s true that every dollar helps. But if you fritter away various gifts without a larger intention, you’re more likely to lose track of them and miss out on the biggest reward of philanthropy: the satisfaction of getting fired up about a problem and doing something meaningful to fix it.

The first step is to self-evaluate. When I spoke with Barbara Stanny, a financial therapist who has written seven books about money management, she was very stern about the necessary groundwork. “The four rules of money: You spend less, you save more, you invest wisely, and you give generously — in that order,” she said. “If you don’t, not only do you sabotage your own future security, but you diminish the impact you can make.”

Stanny also believes that, when done properly, giving money away can also inspire people to make and save more of it. “I was working with an artist who made decent money, but she would just spend it all,” she said. “To get her to be a better steward of her money, I said, ‘Imagine you had more money than you needed. What would you use it for?’ And she got all excited about supporting nonprofits for artists. It shifted everything. What seemed absolutely boring and stupid — managing money — suddenly became interesting to her, because there was a greater purpose.”

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