YouTube Videos Can Now be Used to Raise Money for Charity

YouTube donation cards let viewers donate money to charity without leaving site

By Saqib Shah January 27, 2016

YouTube has rolled out a new feature that lets creators in the U.S. add prompts for charity donations directly to their videos.

Now, when someone views a video that has a donation card enabled, they will be able to contribute money to the creator’s charity of choice, without having to leave YouTube to visit an external site.

Donation cards allow creators to raise money for any U.S. IRS-validated, public non-profit organization; an extensive list of applicable charities can be found here. The non-profit will receive 100 percent of the donation, according to YouTube.

The feature has been available to charities on the Google-owned video service for some time, but it’s now open to all creators stateside. It makes it easier for creators to raise awareness for causes they care about without sabotaging the look of their videos using annotations or extensive descriptions.

Viewers who wish to contribute can do so by simply clicking the donation card in the “more info” section below a video. This will then create a pop-up window, where you can adjust the amount you wish to donate.

Setting up the feature is also relatively simple. Just head to the “video manager” section and activate donation cards on a video by hitting the “edit” button and selecting the function from the drop-down menu. A pop-up window will then appear, prompting you to enter a charity into its search directory function. YouTube claims that creators, including John and Hank Green and Madison Beer, are already using donation cards to raise money for charities.

“YouTube has over a billion users. That’s almost one-third of all people on the Internet,” states YouTube in a blog post announcing the new feature. “Every day those users watch hundreds of millions of hours of video, racking up billions of views – which are now billions of opportunities to do good.”

The donations card feature is available on both the mobile and desktop versions of the platform.

Editors' Recommendations