So you have a Magento web store that you use to sell goods, but you would like to also support a charity or other not-for-profit?  Why not allow you customers to donate to the cause from your web store?

When selecting a cause or causes to support, think about whether the demographics for your store are likely to support the cause.  Tom’s shoes for example donate a pair of shoes for every pair sold.  Their charitable acts make sense to customers – it aligns with their business.

Browsing around, I found the following Magento donation extensions.  I have not used any myself – this is a summary of my investigation.  If you know of any more, please add a comment!

Donations Ultimate by MageWorx to quote “allows you to add donation block to your products and accept donations from your customers. Also donation can be added to an order total right before the checkout process from customer’s shopping cart.”  My reading indicates you can change the donation purpose text, set a minimum donation, generate donation reports, and so on.  It’s not free, but appears to have good reviews and well maintained (supported across a range of Magneto releases).

Customer Price – Donation & Bargaining by FMEExtensions allows customers to adjust the price for an item.  The module describes how this can be used for bargaining (e.g. customer proposes a lower price for the merchant to consider) or to support donations (customer can choose how much they will give).

Give Change Make Change to quote “is a virtual collection tin for retailers to enable their shoppers to round-up purchases and make donations to charity”.  A number of UK based charities are listed.  You might need to check if this module is up to date.  It is free, but noted as provided “as-is” and does not list the most recent versions of Magento as being supported.  Be aware that it might require a bit of tweaking to get it working with the latest versions of Magento.

fraisr Spenden-Plugin is German, and to quote “Ganz einfach Spendenverkäufe im Shop einrichten und selbst über Spendenpartner und Spendenanteil entscheiden” which according to Google translate means “Easily set up donations in the shop sales and decide on donations and Partners Donation”.  It’s free, and lists up to the latest Magento release.

Checkout Tool for Micro-donations by Beanstalk got mentioned in the forums a few times, is free, but seems to be falling behind.  It has not been updated since a Magento 1.5 release.  To quote, it “harnesses the power of micro-donations by inviting your customers to round up their change or add an extra dollar to their balance for donation to a charity of their choice.  We then aggregate these donations and thousands more from other e-tailer partners in our network, and distribute them to the corresponding non-profits.”  Beanstalk collects up to 7% of donations to cover costs.

Some other forum posts that may also be interesting

• Add a Cause/Charity to onepage checkout?
• Is there a way to set up a “Donation” code?
• I’d like to have a “Make a donation” item for a charity. Anyway to have an user-input price field?
• Donations
• Magento – tracking who to give back to

Another option for completeness is PayPal has a range of options – from a Donate button such as above, to discounted rates for not-for-profit organizations. Check out the PayPal page for more details.

Why not think about a charity related to your store, and add a donate button to support them?

Disclaimer: I work in the eBay Inc group of companies, which includes PayPal and Magento. The opinions in this post are however my own are do not represent any official endorsement of the products mentioned.  I just like seeing people use technology for the good of others.