Give Amazon.com’s money to your favorite nonprofit at no cost to you!

Attention Amazon customers. AmazonSmile will allow you donate Amazon’s money to your favorite nonprofit organization at no cost to you.

Here’s how it works:

1) You go to AmazonSmile and choose a nonprofit from their list of over 1 million nonprofits. Their list is US 501(c)(3) organizations that register with Amazon or are in Guidestar (Guidestar gathers and disseminates information about US nonprofits registered with the IRS). By the way, if you’re a nonprofit you can register here.

2) When you buy something at Amazon, you go through the smile URL. Prices and products are exactly the same as they’d be if you didn’t use the Amazon Smile URL.

3) Amazon donates .5% of the purchase price to the nonprofit (excluding subscribe and save subscription purchases, shipping fees, gift wrapping costs, taxes and service fees.)

I love that Amazon isn’t asking for anything in exchange. We don’t have to like Amazon on Facebook, retweet something from them or register for something. We’re getting a donation to the nonprofit simply because we’re customers.

We’re also able to choose the nonprofit we like best. It’s awesome when a company offers to donate money on their customers’ behalf and actually lets the customers choose from over 1 million nonprofits. (My all time favorite example of this, by the way, is the $100 gift card SEER Interactive gave to clients from JustGive. Clients could donate the $100 to any of almost 1.8 million charities on the JustGive web site.)

You have to remember to go to the Amazon Smile URL every time you purchase. To make it easier, there is a Chrome extension and a Firefox extension that ensures all of your Amazon purchases go through Smile.

AmazonSmile general manager Ian McAllister was asked what stockholders thought of the program. He said, “We thought our customers would love it.”

I certainly do.

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If you’re looking for other, easy ways to do good and make a difference, you should check out:

Where to donate your stuff. A comprehensive list of where to donate everything from clothes to cars to cell phones, to musical instruments, to video games, to stuffed animals and more. All to places where your donations will make a difference.

103 Random Acts of Kindness that will make you an everyday hero – this has over 103 unique and easy ways you can make a difference

Random Acts of Kindness for Kids. This has 25 ideas for raising grateful and kind kids.

By the way, scientific research shows that acts of kindness not only helps someone else, but will also make you significantly happier (See point 18 in Be Happy: 46 Proven Techniques to Increase Your Happiness and One Way to Get More Sex)