A disproportionate number of charitable givers wait until the last day of the year to make their donation, running the risk that they will forget and miss out on the tax deduction, according to the CEO of Canada’s online resource for charitable giving.
“We’ve seen examples of where people started making their donation at 11:59 p.m. on New Year’s Eve and then did not complete the task until 12:01 a.m. the next day,” Owen Charters, president of CanadaHelps.org, told Business in Vancouver last Friday.
“I don’t know why they would even be at the computer then. They should be out raising a glass and kissing their partner at midnight.”
Charters’ company is itself a charitable foundation. Visitors to the CanadaHelps.org website can search 89,000 charities and securely donate through the site. The organization deducts a fee of 3.9%, which includes credit card fees and banking costs, before the donation is passed on to the charity.
For many of Canada’s small and medium-sized charities, CanadaHelps.org acts as the back-end technology if the charities have a donate button on their own websites.
Charters estimated that about 5% of annual charitable donations are made on December 31. Last New Year’s Eve, British Columbians made 1,457 donations totaling $360,539 through Charters’ website. Vancouverites made 441 donations totaling $128,808 on that day.
