Platform lets anyone donate to charity with a tweet

Charitweet is facilitating small donations to any charity on Twitter through a quick tweet or RT.

As much as we’re loathe to admit, it’s likely that the data overload of the internet is re-hardwiring our brains and giving us shorter attention spans. While that’s good news for cat videomakers and clickbait merchants, it’s not great for the people and causes we should really be paying attention to. We’ve previously covered ChangeTip, which offers an easy and quick way to send Bitcoin to worthy content creators via a tweet. Now using similar technology, Charitweet is facilitating small donations to any charity on Twitter through a quick tweet or RT.

Sending money through the service is fairly easy. Twitter users simply create a new tweet that has the USD amount they want to send(using Twitter’s $ tag), along with an @ tag for the charity and Charitweet’s own Twitter handle — @CHRTWT. Alternatively, they can just retweet someone else’s Charitweet message to match that donation. The first time a user tags @CHRTWT, they’ll receive a notification which asks them to fill out their billing info on the Charitweet site. Once complete, a confirmation receipt is sent and the user can continue donating without having to re-enter their details. Charitweet ensures the money goes directly to the nonprofit selected, aside from a 5.9 percent fee that’s taken by them and USD 0.50 that goes to the credit card processor.

The service helps donors give money to good causes in the time it takes to compose a tweet, and given the viral nature of social media, offers much wider exposure than a private donation. Those with large numbers of followers could end up crowdsourcing huge gains for their chosen charity through the platform. Are there other ways to enable quick payments through social media?