“Alexa, please donate…”: Using Amazon Donate

“Alexa, please give $50 to Salvation Army.”

That’s how easy it is for the 39 million Americans who own an Amazon Echo to donate to their favorite charity with their digital assistant, Alexa.

That’s right: Amazon has opened up its donate functionality on the Amazon Echo and in typical Amazon fashion, it is simple, smart, and highly effective for charities. It’s called Amazon Donate.

With a simple command, a donor can donate between $5 and $5,000 to your charity. The funds will simply come out of the account set up on the Echo.

After a donation, Amazon shares the funds (obviously) along with the name, email address, and physical address with the charity. This level of information is not even provided to nonprofits by Facebook’s new donate feature.

Right now, Amazon owns 82% of the smart speaker market, with a whopping 39 million users. And 57% of smart speaker owners have bought something via voice (according to Smart Audio Report). This means that the user base is increasingly comfortable with voice-driven transactions. Indeed, smart platforms like Alexa are making the process of transacting via voice even simpler and more common.

But this means it’s our job to be ready whenever and wherever donors are ready to give.

For charities, it’s really simple to set up. You don’t need to “train” Alexa with a new “skill” – you just sign up for an Amazon Pay account to make this happen.

There is a 2.2% processing fee and a $0.30 authorization fee, just like any other merchant account. But with a few quick steps here you’re up and running. You also get access to Amazon’s one-click frictionless donation forms when you sign up for Amazon Pay.

Bottom line, there’s no reason not to enable this additional revenue channel right now.

“Now, Alexa, please make me a cappuccino.”


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Dunham+Company can help evaluate your church or nonprofit’s strategy and use of integrated technologies to fuel donor support.