YouTube’s New Donation Cards Help Video Creators Raise Money for Charities

YouTube just made it a lot easier for its users in the U.S. to use its videos to drive donations to nonprofit organizations. With the new donation cards, video creators can now choose from more than 1.8 million IRS-validated 501(c)3 nonprofits and send direct donations to them right from the video creators' videos.

Nonprofits could already use these cards on their own videos. Often, though, it’s videos from regular YouTube users that are far more likely to solicit donations than a slickly produced video from a nonprofit. The Ice Bucket Challenge probably would have generated even more donations to the ALS Association if people had been able to add donation cards to their videos.

YouTube users could, of course, always use annotations in their videos to link to fundraising sites, but those are probably far less likely to result in actual donations than a YouTube card.