Credit Card News: Technology

If you’d like to donate more money to good causes, but you never seem to get around to setting up the donations, a new app will make it easier to be generous.

The app, called Movements, lets users donate small amounts that come from their credit cards. Here’s how it works: people choose a project they’d like to donate to. Then they link a credit card or cards (debit cards work too) to the app, using secure, encrypted channels that ensure the accounts are not compromised. Every time they make a purchase using those linked cards, Movements will round up the amount to the nearest dollar and make the extra amount available for donations.

If people aren’t sure what sort of cause they’d like to donate to, Movements also suggests some. The app showcases curated social projects in seven different categories, making it easy to choose one that users are passionate about. Curated projects have funding goals and time limits, giving folks an incentive to choose a cause or project they really want to see succeed.

Encouraging Millennials to Give

The inventors of Movements wanted to make it easier for young people to start donating money to good causes; research shows that although they are the largest demographic in the United States, Millennials also give the least to charity. Instead, they prefer to give their money to projects that are crowdfunded via websites like Kickstarter or GoFundMe. Movements doesn’t donate money to nonprofits or traditional charities; instead, it donates to individual projects. This allows full transparency about what happens to donations.

Once a user has donated to a cause, they will receive regular updates about the project via the app. Jong Woo, founder of Movements, says the app was created with the idea of inspiring younger people to donate money. “We knew we had to create something that would resonate with today’s generation of charitable donors to leverage the power of tech and social media to expand upon the way we impact the world around us.” Woo says Movements will “disrupt the industry” of charitable donations.

The Movements app is available for free at the App Store for download to Apple iOS devices, and can be linked to any credit card or debit card.