Amazon closing AmazonSmile to focus its philanthropic giving to programs with greater impact
I just received the following email. There’s also a notice up on their website. Since many folks here use AmazonSmile to make additional donations to charities, thought folks should know.
Dear customer,
In 2013, we launched AmazonSmile to make it easier for customers to support their favorite charities. However, after almost a decade, the program has not grown to create the impact that we had originally hoped. With so many eligible organizations—more than 1 million globally—our ability to have an impact was often spread too thin.
We are writing to let you know that we plan to wind down AmazonSmile by February 20, 2023. We will continue to pursue and invest in other areas where we’ve seen we can make meaningful change—from building affordable housing to providing access to computer science education for students in underserved communities to using our logistics infrastructure and technology to assist broad communities impacted by natural disasters.
To help charities that have been a part of the AmazonSmile program with this transition, we will be providing them with a one-time donation equivalent to three months of what they earned in 2022 through the program, and they will also be able to accrue additional donations until the program officially closes in February. Once AmazonSmile closes, charities will still be able to seek support from Amazon customers by creating their own wish lists.
As a company, we will continue supporting a wide range of other programs that help thousands of charities and communities across the U.S. For instance:
Housing Equity Fund: We’re investing $2 billion to build and preserve affordable housing in our hometown communities. In just two years, we’ve provided funding to create more than 14,000 affordable homes—and we expect to build at least 6,000 more in the coming months. These units will host more than 18,000 moderate- to low-income families, many of them with children. In one year alone, our investments have been able to increase the affordable housing stock in communities like Bellevue, Washington and Arlington, Virginia by at least 20%.
Amazon Future Engineer: We’ve funded computer science curriculum for more than 600,000 students across over 5,000 schools—all in underserved communities. We have plans to reach an additional 1 million students this year. We’ve also provided immediate assistance to 55,000 students in our hometown communities by giving them warm clothes for the winter, food, and school supplies.
Community Delivery Program: We’ve partnered with food banks in 35 U.S. cities to deliver more than 23 million meals, using our logistics infrastructure to help families in need access healthy food – and we plan to deliver 12 million more meals this year alone. In addition to our delivery services, we’ve also donated 30 million meals in communities across the country.
Amazon Disaster Relief: We’re using our logistics capabilities, inventory, and cloud technology to provide fast aid to communities affected by natural disasters. For example, we’ve created a Disaster Relief Hub in Atlanta with more than 1 million relief items ready for deployment, our Disaster Relief team has responded to more than 95 natural disasters, and we’ve donated more than 20 million relief products to nonprofits assisting communities on the ground.
Community Giving: We support hundreds of local nonprofits doing meaningful work in cities where our employees and their families live. For example, each year we donate hundreds of millions of dollars to organizations working to build stronger communities, from youth sport leagues, to local community colleges, to shelters for families experiencing homelessness.
We’ll continue working to make a difference in many ways, and our long-term commitment to our communities remains the same—we’re determined to do every day better for our customers, our employees, and the world at large.
Thank you for being an Amazon customer.
I think that the email doesn’t actually support your title—they make no claim of counterfactual focus. It seems more to me like the mention of other programs they’re already investing in is trying to signal “hey we’re still good, even though we’re shutting down this program”. I suspect that the decision is probably primarily profit-driven in that running a whole nother version of their website which donates lots of little amounts to tiny charities is a large infrastructure cost.
The title of this post is the same title they used for the notice on their website with basically the same text as the email.
Please don’t use PR titles as LW post titles. A factual: “Amazon closes AmazonSmile” would be way better.
I’m surprised to see you quoting that literally? I don’t see how we can take their word for that and there’s no other evidence source.
Eh. I feel like I’m just sharing what they posted because I think people here are interested. I’m not trying to make any claims.
I think I’d opt to quote the original title in a post here to indicate that it’s not a ‘claim’ being made (by me).
My personal commentary: probably not much of a loss, but directionally sucks. No charity was receiving much money this way as far as I know, but was a nice way to feel a bit better about shopping on Amazon since you got to pick where their charitable giving went, and I’m sure it had some marginal impact for some charities. I’m also sure there’s a backstory, like wanting to not be neutral on where the funds go because they leave it up to customers to choose from any registered charity, but that’s not present in the announcement.
it probably wasn’t coming close to offsetting use of amazon vs less monopolizing/moloch-loving competitors.