Giving back on your special day

I have a few friends who are getting married this year, and I'm pretty sure they are already done with their registries. I do know that I have a lot of friends and cousins who have weddings in their future sometime, so listen up!

You can have a percentage of the price of your wedding gifts donated to the charity of your choice! Why not give back as those give to you? Guests go through the I Do Foundation website to find your registry and then click on the store that you have registered at. Once there, if they purchase online, money gets donated to your charity.

Example:

When my husband and I did our registry, we went through the foundation website. We registered at Target which donated 5% of the price of the gift to the National CASA Association. As of this point, $19.69 had been donated from our wedding presents.

Some tips, pros and cons:

We did most of our registering on the website and if a lot of your items are only available online, it pushes your guests towards ordering ahead and online instead of in the store the day of your wedding.

Procrastinators were likely to be a big reason that a lot of our gifts were purchased in the store, really talking up the benefits for the purchaser as well as the charity to those you are close with may help with this.

There is really no reason to not do this, it doesn't take very much time and no one loses anything if no money is donated.

One big problem is that a lot of times registries get passed around by word of mouth, so if my mom told my aunt we were registered at Target, they would have no idea that there was a way to help donate money to charity.

We ran into a couple problems with different generations not being as interested in technology. Some people probably did not want to deal with ordering online. Some people may have just been confused, we seemed to have problems getting folks to RSVP online as well. If you have any ideas on how to solve this problem, let me know!



Oh and for those of you that I know getting married in Aug, Sept and Nov - I just checked the FAQs on their website and you can do this if you've already registered! The only excuse you have now is if the store you registered at isn't on their list. and....Go!