It’s 11am and you’re craving ice cream. You slip on some shoes and head to the nearest frozen food aisle. As you pay for your pint of pistachio, the pin pad at the register asks if you’d like to round up and donate your change to the Trust for Public Land. The bored-looking teenager behind the register watches you blankly, waiting to see whether you’ll support new trails for the Chattahoochee Riverlands. Of course you will. It’s only 25 cents. 

You aren’t alone. Americans have been donating at checkout since at least 1987, when Costco and Walmart began nudging customers to contribute an extra dollar or two to children’s hospitals. Now, social-impact technology company Accelerist estimates that up to 86% of consumers participate every year, contributing more than $605 million in 2020. And checkout campaigns grew by 55% between 2012 and 2020, far outpacing charitable giving as a whole. That success is due to a series of breakthroughs that have tracked changes in consumer behavior, making the campaigns easier and more effective than ever. 

For instance, checkout campaigns were once held mostly in stores like JCPenney, Kmart, and Safeway, with big-box retailers contributing the lion’s share of donations. But as consumers began shopping online, checkout campaigns followed suit — companies like eBay, Domino’s, and PayPal added online donation options. Today, almost half of all campaigns also ask for their donations online or in-app. Ecommerce has supercharged this form of giving — some digital companies have out-raised their physical counterparts on significantly less revenue: Walmart and Sam’s Club, for example, took 31 years to raise $1 billion, but it took eBay just 16 years to hit that mark. 

Retailers also found a counterintuitive way to boost donations: by asking for less. Traditional checkout campaigns asked for a flat donation of $1 or $5, but many companies have started offering the option to round a transaction to the nearest dollar and donate the change. A recent study showed that people view these roundup requests as less painful than flat donation requests, and are more likely to donate even if the sum of money is exactly the same. This effect increases donation totals over time by about 21%. The round up option is quickly becoming the dominant form of checkout fundraising — comprising 16% of campaign asks in 2016, 38% in 2018, and 47% in 2020. This trend shows up in the overall statistics as well — while total dollars donated at checkout has increased, the average donation has decreased. In other words, people are giving more, but when they give, they give less.

With this new emphasis on repeated giving, platforms like Lyft are offering ways for consumers to automate their giving. With set-it-and-forget-it models, riders opt to have each transaction rounded up and donated. Securing an up-front commitment from riders to donate — without having to constantly ask permission — makes the process painless, mindless, and consistent. Lisa Boyd, Lyft’s director of social impact, describes the stakes: “The amount of money these campaigns can raise is huge. Nonprofits need these funds. So we’re trying to make this model of philanthropy work for millennials and younger consumers.”

Lyft’s Round Up & Donate program, launched in 2017, just passed the $30 million mark in donations, with those funds going to partners like the ACLU Foundation, the Human Rights Campaign, Goodwill, and, yes, new trails for the Chattahoochee Riverlands, supported by the Trust for Public Land. 

The content provided in this article is for informational purposes only. Unless otherwise stated, Lyft is not affiliated with any businesses or organizations mentioned in the article.