How to Give Back to the WordPress Foundation when Shopping on Amazon

Consumer disappointment ran high yesterday when Amazon Prime Day failed to deliver on its ambitious claim to have “more deals than Black Friday.” Prime customers were surprised to find modest deals on knee braces, shoe horns, and pet grooming kits instead of steep discounts on shiny electronics.

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The world was optimistic that if any company could create a consumer holiday out of thin air, Amazon would be the one to do it. Despite Prime Day’s humor-inspiring failure, consumer obsession with the online retail giant isn’t likely to wane anytime soon. In fact, the company reported that its “‘Prime Day’ peak order rates surpassed that of 2014’s Black Friday” early in the day.

If you’re a die hard Amazon shopper, you’ll probably continue on as if Prime Day never happened. Here’s how you can do something good for WordPress while you’re at it:

The AmazonSmile Foundation enables shoppers to support their favorite charitable organizations when making purchases, at no extra cost. If you select a charity, AmazonSmile will automatically donate 0.5% of the purchase price from your eligible purchases. The WordPress Foundation is among the nearly one million organizations that you can support.

To sign up, simply visit Smile.Amazon.com and select the WordPress Foundation. You’ll be presented with options that will help you navigate to Smile.Amazon.com more conveniently the next time you shop. If you have already selected a charity and want to change it, you can visit your account settings to search and select a new organization.

What does the WordPress Foundation do?

Before you opt to support the WordPress Foundation, it’s important to know what it’s all about. The 501(c)3 non-profit organization was established “to further the mission of the WordPress open source project: to democratize publishing through Open Source, GPL software.” Matt Mullenweg created the charity to ensure that future generations will have access to WordPress as the project’s leadership and contributor base continue to evolve. It also exists to protect the WordPress and WordCamp trademarks and logos.

A large portion of donations to the foundation go towards subsidizing WordCamp expenses, including video production of presentations for WordCamp.tv. The foundation also covers Meetup.com organizer dues for those who run WordPress meetups. At the beginning of this year, the foundation created a new traveling scholarship for women attending WordCamp US, in memory of Kim Parsell, a prolific WordPress contributor who passed away this year.

When you support the WordPress Foundation, you are supporting a variety of community initiatives that help ensure the future of WordPress for years to come. Rose Goldman, who helps manage the foundation, recently set the organization up on AmazonSmile. So far, she said the donations from Amazon represent just a trickle of the budget, but that’s probably due to lack of awareness of AmazonSmile. If you haven’t yet selected a charity for automatic donations from AmazonSmile, the WordPress Foundation is a worthy cause.