Frequently Asked Questions Email us with questions at: [email protected] Who can use Silent Donor? Anyone! Our service is used by individual donors, large and small companies, trusts, and foundations. We believe that all people and organizations should feel free to donate to the causes they care about privately – without needing to face unwanted attention, a fear of public backlash, or becoming inundated with multiple emails, calls, or texts from organizations urging you to send another donation. Where can we donate? Almost anywhere! The following list shows some common organizations that you can send donations to with Silent Donor: In accordance with US Law, you cannot use the Silent Donor platform to make any donations to political candidates, parties, campaigns, PACs, or Super PACs at any level (local, state federal, etc). How does your donation process work and how does it allow for me to donate completely anonymously? All donations that are sent on our secure platform to charities/nonprofits will first go immediately to The AnonDo Fund (Anonymous Donation Fund), a registered 501 (c)(3) donor advised fund that the executive team at Silent Donor created & designed specifically to shield and protect the privacy of our donors. It is briefly held in this fund for 30 days, so our team has time to perform due diligence. Then, The AnonDo Fund will send the donation to the organization you have chosen on your behalf without including ANY of your personal information, ensuring your ultimate privacy while also emailing you a tax-deductible receipt! Basically, the donation will look like it is coming directly from the AnonDo Fund – your information/identity is nowhere to be found. For donations to crowdfunding campaigns like GoFundMe, we also send the donations on your behalf so that you remain totally anonymous, but we send these donations as soon as we can, usually within 7 days (more on that below). These are not tax-deductible donations. How do I know that my donation is sent to the place where I want it to go? We send each donor an email after we successfully send your donation to the exact organization that you recommend. If there are any problems for any reason, a team member will contact you directly! How is our data and privacy protected by Silent Donor and The AnonDo Fund? Our organizations do not engage in the selling or exchanging of any client information whatsoever. The privacy of all donor information entered into our donation forms is the highest priority of our entire company. It is our core competency. We are unique in that our platform (and Fund) has been built from the ground up with donor privacy in mind. As a result, our guiding practice is to completely remove all personal information from the back end of our server database every month and store this information in a secure Veracrypt vault. We only keep the minimum information in our Veracrypt vaults to comply with record-keeping requirements. In addition, we exclusively use the industry’s leading encrypted email platform to carry out all correspondence with our clients. If you receive an email from Silent Donor, it will be sent from our encrypted email service. We use industry leading processors for credit/debit card and ACH transfers. When will we send your donation? For donations going to charities/nonprofits, we will typically send all donations we receive on the last day of each month. Principally, this helps ease the burden of our operations as we conduct any necessary due diligence related to the organizations chosen by donors. We also pool all donations together into one account to help achieve a miniature economy of scale, with the view to help us render one client’s donation indistinguishable from the next, offering even more privacy protection to our donors. We are committed to sending donations quickly to ensure that the impact of your donation is felt right away. For donations going to crowdfunding campaigns such as GoFundMe, we send the donations as soon as they settle in our account – usually within 7 days. We do this to make sure we get your donation into these campaigns quickly. Unlike charities and nonprofits which are always accepting gifts, organizers of these crowdfunding campaigns can decide to stop fundraising whenever they would like. We send all donors an email upon the successful distribution of their anonymous donation, so you can have peace of mind that your donation has made its impact. Are the donations I send through Silent Donor tax deductible? For all donations that donors are sending to US-based charities/nonprofits, the answer is yes! All of these donations are received by and sent through the fund we created called the AnonDo Fund, which is itself a registered 501(c)(3) tax-exempt organization. So, you will receive a tax-deductible receipt for the amount donated via email from the AnonDo Fund upon submitting your donation. Then, the AnonDo Fund will send the donation to the organization you chose, but it will appear as a donation coming from the Fund and will not mention any information from the donor at all. If you are donating to a crowdfunding campaign such as GoFundMe, your donation is not tax-deductible. You will receive an ordinary payment receipt from us, but it will not claim to be, nor act as a tax-deductible receipt. If you are not living in the US (maybe you live in Europe) and you are donating through our international charitable fund to a charity outside of the US, the availability of tax deductions may vary depending on the country in which you reside. How do I know if I am choosing a charity or nonprofit (501(c)(3) organization) in the US as the destination of my donation? Any well-known charity, nonprofit, university/school, religious place of worship, foundation etc. is likely classified as a 501(c)(3) already. Have no fear – we will perform due diligence on your behalf once you submit your donation form and we’ll let you know if there are any issues. If you would like to search yourself to see if the organization to which you would like to donate is classified as a 501(c)(3), feel free to click here or here and type in the name of the org – you can also filter your search by state. Please note: sometimes the name you may know might not be the official name of the organization’s charitable registration, so it may help to refine your search to a particular state, or just use general keywords in the title if you can’t find it. Our seasoned staff can also help you track it down! You can email us at [email protected] with your inquiry. Where can we NOT donate? Please note that YOU MAY NOT DONATE TO ANY OF THE FOLLOWING: United States political parties, political candidates or political campaigns (at ANY level – federal, state, local), political action committees (PACs), or Super PACs – as per US law. It is illegal to send a US political donation on behalf of someone else. You also cannot donate to United States 501(c)(4) organizations through this platform at this time. However, please note that many 501(c)(4) and political organizations may run accompanying 501(c)(3) organizations, which you are free to donate to as much as you would like. [We comply with global AML frameworks as well as the FATF and U.S. Department of the Treasury Anti-Terrorist Financing Guidelines for donations going outside of the US]. Is there a fee for using Silent Donor? As of now, there is a small platform fee of five percent of a given donation. When people give through Silent Donor, they are not only contributing to a charitable cause, they’re also helping us build a more robust philanthropic infrastructure to support anonymous donations from donors around the world. This fee allows us to offer our services at a greater scale and helps us spearhead the fight for donor privacy. These fees help cover grant making, recordkeeping, tax filing, and various other operating expenses. How does it work if I donate via Cryptocurrency? If you are donating cryptocurrency, we currently support Bitcoin donations. Simply fill out our cryptocurrency donation form with your information. Our Bitcoin donations are processed by OpenNode. Please note that you must donate an amount equivalent to $50 in Bitcoin at the time of your donation. Donations under $50 will be considered incomplete donations and will be treated as a donation to directly support the AnonDo Fund. Please note that all donations are first sent to the AnonDo Fund. Your donation receipt will also come from the AnonDo Fund via email for cryptocurrency donations. BTC donations will be converted to fiat currency and donated to the organization you have chosen on the form. We do this because we have found (painstakingly) that the vast majority of organizations simply do not yet have the means to accept cryptocurrency donations at this time (but we did not want to let that stop donors from donating in bitcoin!). If you donate $50 equivalent in BTC and then later the value of BTC declines, the AnonDo Fund will honor your donation and will send your donation to the organization you have chosen even if it is lower than $50. How does it work if I pay via Bank Transfer (ACH or Wire Transfer)? For Wire Transfers – after you submit our simple wire transfer donation form, you will receive an automatic email that includes the bank account information of our charitable fund. Then you can use this banking information to complete the wire transfer to our bank account. Once we receive the wire transfer, you will receive a tax-deductible receipt from our Fund for the amount donated! Wire transfers are faster than ACH transfers and are generally used for larger donation amounts. If you are paying by ACH bank transfer, simply fill out our ACH donation form with your information. The ACH donation limit is $50,000. Anything higher than that, please use the wire transfer form. At the end of the donation form, once you click ‘proceed to pay’ it will prompt our trusted banking partner Plaid to ask you to securely log in to your chosen bank. We want you to be comfortable with our private ACH donation process, so we offer an in-depth walkthrough of the process here here. Is there a donation minimum or maximum? There is a donation minimum of $50 for credit/debit payments, $200 for bank wire transfers, and $100 for bank ACH transfers. There is no maximum limit. We have worked with regular people, private corporations, and wealthy private citizens. We think it is important that the legal anonymity offered by complex giving vehicles (like our charitable funds) is accessible to anyone, regardless of wealth.
The AnonDo Fund operates a simplified Donor Advised Fund (DAF) that takes in donations and accepts recommendations from donors on where they should go. As long as our donors suggest a charity or nonprofit [a 501(c)(3)] organization on our donation forms, the Fund will send the donations exactly where you recommend with complete anonymity, a uniquely legal process utilized by DAFs. All donations sent to the AnonDo Fund will be automatically sent out within 31 days of receipt (unless otherwise arranged), ensuring that the impact of your donation will be felt right away. We are fully committed to sending donations to the exact organizations that donors specify on our donation forms.