I was looking at the marketing materials for a charity (which I'll call X) over the weekend, when I saw something odd at the bottom of their donation form:

Check here to increase your donation by 3% to defray the cost of credit card processing.

It's not news to me that credit card companies charge merchants a cut of every transaction.  But the ramifications of this for charitable contributions had never sunk in. I use my credit card for all of the purchases I can (I get pretty good cash-back rates). Automatically drafting from my checking account (like a check, only without the check) costs X nothing. So I've increased the effectiveness of my charitable contributions by a small (<3%) amount by performing what amounts to a paperwork tweak.

If you use a credit card for donations, please think about making this tweak as well!