rick L.
1/5
I sent out 7 gift cards for $50 each... 3 were redeemed, but 4 were never redeemed by recipient before they expired... so JustGive keeps the $200 as a donation to themselves... How many thousands of dollars do they keep this way? The total amount and how it is used should be published annually. It would be preferable if there was a default organization that the donor can specify where the money should go should gift cards not be redeemed.
Also their charity search feature is biased to only American charities in the JustGive Guide search... and try get charity in another country and its impossible to find. For example try to donate to Doctors Without Borders which is a France based NGO called Médecins Sans Frontièrs (MSF)... you can only get the American affiliation... that is why one of the recipients reported that they did not redeem their gift card... they understood perhaps none of the 1.8 million charities were from their home country of Switzerland that they could find... so all they wanted to do was donate to any organization helping environment or animals or underprivileged children using the guide search, but could find nothing that was not US based. If you try to search locally, you can only enter a US zip code. The only way to possibly get a charity in another country is if you specifically know the exact name or EIN to type in. Try to search locally or browse by topic and you only can get US charities.
Not a very fair representation... I hope that all of those 1.8 million charities that you supposedly can reach are in fact in the US, because the rest of them can't be found... not very fair. I hope you also don't charge the charities a fee as well for being listed on your "service".
To top it off, it cost me $20 because JustGive charges as a fee for each gift card for their "service". So that's a total of $220 they kept. Not good value for my $370 donation.
I tried calling but the voicemail says they don't answer enquiries by phone, only by e-mail to save money. I can appreciate that, but maybe I'm blind, but couldn't find an e-mail address on their site. Maybe they could save more money by not having their office located in downtown San Francisco to operate a virtual presence organization that could be located someplace more economical. I'm sure lunches and rent and parking for staff is pretty cheap too, but salaries to support that has to be financed from somewhere.
