Laptop and charity

[triskellian]

On the subject of my latest toy, this, too, is being typed from the comfort of my bed. Oh! The joy of wireless networking! It's taking me a while to get used to the keyboard, which is a strange one even apart from the fact that I'm used to a natural keyboard, but, on the whole, I declare the laptop a thing of beauty and a joy forever, as someone who may have been Rhiannon, referred to it earlier.

On charity, I've recently decided that I should be giving some money to good causes. The difficult question now is which charity. There are so many causes I believe in, and think deserve my money, and only so much money. It's hard to narrow it down even to a reasonable shortlist. The National Asthma Campaign is the only one I'm reasonably sure about, for obvious reasons, but I'd like to choose one or two more. So my question to you is, do you give to charity, and if so, which ones, and how did you decide?

Comments

[onebyone.livejournal.com]

I have been outrageously bad on this the last three years - I've given no money regularly to charity at all, which I consider (in my specific case rather than in general) to be unconscionable.

I finally managed to send in my Give As You Earn form last week though, so I'm eagerly awaiting the arrival of my charity card. I have essentially the same decision ahead of me as you do, except that I'm currently keeping things flexible - the cash is committed, it has to go to some charity or other, but I can decide on a month-by-month basis which. The dead cert in the immediate future is Comic Relief, plus either Oxfam or some other famine relief campaign.

If your employer supports it, by the way, I recommend you look into Give As You Earn. It's not taxed, which saves you having to make a Gift Aid declaration and the charity having to claim the tax back from the Inland Revenue, and the treasury adds a 10% sweetener to the deal. 2% of that is clawed straight back in administration, but it's still a bonus. If there are any useability niggles I can hopefully report them soon.

Even if you aren't going to use GAYE, there's a list of charities on their site, and an even longer one on the Charity Comission site, that might provide some inspiration.

[triskellian]

Apparently my employer (pause while I realise I can't actually type lying flat on my stomach ;-) does offer GAYE. All I have to do now is choose some charities... I think I'm going to go for more of a 'set up a standing order and forget about it' kinda approach, though.