Official Way to Donate Swagbucks to Haiti Victims

Swagbucks has now set it up so you can donate your Swagbucks directly to a Haiti Earthquake Relief fund that will go to Yele.org (the Wyclef Jean charity), the American Red Cross and Doctors Without Borders. The exchange rate will be as good as 10:1; if they collect 1 million SwagBucks in the fund they will donate $100,000.

If they collect less than a million SB the exchange will be slightly less generous -- 14:1 or better. But I'm guessing that they'll raise a lot of Swagbucks donations, which will make it a better deal than cashing SwagBucks into PayPal deposits and then donating from PayPal (as I had suggested before). It takes 70 Swagbucks to get $5 on PayPal, but a donation of 70 Swagbucks could lead to as much as $7 going to the charities. 

The only disadvantage of donating Swagbucks instead of going directly to one of the Haiti donation sites and giving money is that I don't know if you could tax deduct the gift -- you'd have to ask your tax professional about that one. (I was wondering the same thing about the $10 donations through the 90999 text HAITI thing.) Still, to me Swagbucks doesn't feel like real money, and it was a no brainer to click to donate 100 of them.

If you don't know what Swagbucks is, it's a site that pays you in credits to let them eavesdrop on your Google searches for statistical purposes. I wrote on Wisebread recently about how I saved my Swagbucks throughout 2009 and used them to get most of my husband's Christmas gifts.

P.S. I got this image from Money Saving Mom Crystal Paine, who has generously pledged to donate $10 for everyone who blogs about what they're doing to help Haiti and puts a link on her Haiti post by Jan. 21.