Mokena Native Creates Way To Anonymously Donate Online To Charities

MOKENA, IL — Online privacy, especially for those who choose to donate to non-profit and charitable organizations, is an ever-present concern for individuals and business that want to give but also want to remain anonymous. Until recently there has not been an easily accessible way to do this. So, Mokena native Tim Sanders created a solution.

It's called Silent Donor, and it's a website that allows people and businesses to make donations to any 501(c)3 non-profit or charitable organization and be secure in knowing that the source of that donation will remain completely anonymous, even from the organization that receives the donation.

Sanders said he came up with the idea after he sent an online donation to an organization and starting receiving follow-up mail and email from the organization.

"I was happy to have given back, but I would've preferred to do so privately so I could forgo all the flyers in the mail and solicitation attempts that followed," Sanders said.

This led him on a quest to find a truly anonymous way to give, but he found that those options didn't really exist.

"I was shocked to find that there was no easy way, no online platform designed for donors like me, to send fully anonymous donations quickly and easily," Sanders said.

There are a variety of reasons a donor would want to remain anonymous, Sanders said, including: strong, altruistic beliefs that giving is its own reward; religious beliefs that stress giving anonymously; fear that a donation to a particular organization would be controversial; wanting to avoid being targeted for giving in the future; and many more.

Many charitable organizations have an option for online donors to click that gives them the appearance that they will remain anonymous, but the information the donors enter online to make the donations stays with that organization, which may not be equipped to protect a donor's privacy, thus making the whole process not truly anonymous at all, Sanders explained.

With a lack of options for anonymous donating, Sanders came up with his own solution, and Silent Donor was born.

"This is our public unveiling to everybody," Sanders said. "We haven't done any media or really much marketing at all, so this is our coming out party, more or less."

Silent Donor is able to keep donations completely anonymous because it uses a third-party, independent 501(c)3 intermediary to make those donations. That intermediary is a registered donor-advised fund called the AnonDo Fund that was also created by the Silent Donor executive team.

The AnonDo Fund takes the money from the individual donor, places that money into its fund, and then uses that fund to place the donation without including any of the donor's personal information, Sanders explained.

Donors are immediately given a receipt for their tax-deductible donation, since the AnonDo Fund itself is a tax-deductible non-profit organization, Sanders said. The AnonDo Fund then holds the money in the fund for a short period of time in order for the team at Silent Donor to do its due diligence to ensure that the organization is a legitimate 501(c)3 non-profit organization.

"For example, say you wanted to donate to Red Cross on our website. You would get a donation receipt, a tax-deductible receipt, from the AnonDo Fund," Sanders explained. "And then, at the end of the month, the AnonDo Fund would send your donation to Red Cross.

"At the end of every month, if we successfully have sent the donation that you send in through our platform, we send out an email to you personally, and we let you know that the donation has been sent to the organization that you specified on our donation form."

Sanders said this adds an extra layer of protection for the donors so that they can be safe in knowing they're not being duped or scammed by a fake online organization posing as a non-profit or charity to prey on people's good will, something that can sometimes happen in the aftermath of devastating disasters.

"It is beholden on us as operators of the fund to make sure that all of the distributions we make are going toward registered, accredited 501(c)3 organizations," Sanders said. "So, definitely, anything that comes through the platform, we make sure it's a legitimate organization, from the perspective of protecting donors to make sure they're not being misled and also to maintain the integrity of our fund."

The Silent Donor platform cannot be used in any way for political donations, nor to support 501(c)4 organizations, which are organizations that lobby to Congress and are not tax-deductible, Sanders said. It is illegal under U.S. law to send political donations on behalf of other people. Only donations to 501(c)3 charitable and non-profit organizations are supported by Silent Donor.

Donations made through the Silent Donor platform can start as little as $50, but can go as high as the donor chooses. Silent Donor takes 5 percent of the donation as a fee to keep the company running, Sanders said.

"When people give through Silent Donor, they're not only contributing to the charitable cause of their choice, but they're also helping us build a more robust philanthropic infrastructure to support anonymous donations from donors all around the world," Sanders said. "Even though we're taking the 5 percent out of the donation, it's going toward helping provide this resource to everybody that we can."

Readers can learn more about Silent Donor and the AnonDo Fund, or make a donation to a 501(c)3 organization, by following this link.