It feels good to give. Do it.

I just came across the most amazing idea to induce people to give to more charitable causes. It's called DonorsChoose.

The idea is this: teachers make specific proposals to improve the education for their students. Examples range from fixing broken chairs in a high school science class, to sending a third-grade class on a field trip to D.C., to outfitting middle-schooler with random high-tech gizmos. You, the donor, get to pick exactly how much to donate and what project you want to fund.

The brilliance lies in tearing down the barrier many of us have to donating - it's so impersonal. Writing a fat check to a charity organization, while generous, doesn't really give you that warm fuzzy feeling. Did you even make a difference? You don't know, because most of the time any future correspondence from the donee will be impersonal, or a solicitation for more money.

With DonorsChoose, you can browse through the proposals (I think their browsing and search interface needs some work, but that's another discussion) and when you find one that speaks to you, you click on it to donate. They provide some interesting information about each proposal, such as what % of the students affected are from low-income households, and how much funding the project has already received. You can donate with your credit card, so of course it's easy.

Once you've donated, supposedly the recipients will send you a written thank you letter and photographs of the students you helped.

It seems like savvy teachers will choose small projects that a single generous donor could fund all on their own. Imagine, you have the opportunity to be the one who replaced the leaking schoolhouse roof for sixteen poor kindergarteners. That's concrete.

I got into this because I received a gift mailer from Crate and Barrel. They were offering to fund $25 if I just went to this website and chose where the money went. The website made it very easy to add to the gift amount, so I matched their donation with $25 of my own.

Of course, I'd like to see how well it works from start to finish before I make it a greater part of my charitable contributions, but so far it's a pretty exciting idea. To be fair, some of the projects sound like total lemons. But no system is perfect, and if it sends more money to deserving causes then it's progress. I mean, if our government isn't efficient at distributing money where we think it needs to go (disaster victims, education, etc.), maybe services like this can help balance things out a little better.