Amex and Visa Waive Fees for Haiti Donations Thanks to Huffington Post

The recent tragedy in Haiti has brought to light a real concern to charities and non-profit agencies. People have been flooding charities such as the Red Cross and Wycliffe Jean’s Yule Foundation with donations to help those in need, with a large percentage of those donations being made by credit card.

But donations made by credit card have processing fees attached to them, in fact the average cost to the charity is 3% of each donation, which means credit card companies are raking in significant profits off of money intended to be charitably used for victims of tragedies and circumstances.

In the UK, British banks have chosen to stop charging fees during emergency appeals and disasters. They recognize that one of the best ways to show support for charitable causes is to simply waive interchange fees at such desperate times.

The Huffington Post called attention to the problem in America and both Visa and American Express responded to the criticism by agreeing to rebate any fees that had been taken out of fees on donations (from approved charities) from January 12 until the end of February.

Capital One already had a pledge in place which assures that 100 percent of charitable donations will go to chosen charity, and they recognize over one million charities. Their only requirement is that the donations be made via the Capital One website.

Charitable organizations have been hesitant to make waves, because they recognized that they received significant numbers of contributions via credit card, and didn’t want to put people off of donating by such a convenient method. Getting credit card companies to make concessions certainly goes a long way though to giving the non-profits more cash in hand to use as needed.

For individuals who want to be absolutely sure that their donations are going straight to the charity, another option is to simply mail in a cheque, avoiding any question of processing fees altogether.