Frequently Asked Questions

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Some incentive programs rely on particular sponsors, others bundle donation rewards with certain consumption. As sponsors may be burdened and sponsorships may be discontinued, your disparate good records and rewards in those programs are not portable. Few other programs provide rewards based on volunteering time, or differentiate time values for different good works (e.g., an hour of pro bono legal service versus an hour of volunteer food handout) systematically. Nor do they track how your good work make a difference afterwards.

EthiPoint records all your good works in one place, enables fair acknowledgement and interchangeable rewards for various works, measures your long-term impact and encourages virtuous circles. As you build your ethical profile while doing good, you accumulate ethical points which can be used later, get notified and rewarded automatically when those helped by you further help others, and receive explicit evidence on how your philanthropic efforts generate sustainable results and bring more value to others.

Maybe you are busy working and saving for retirement. But a salary or payment of $1,000 earned from medical care work in 1947 can not exchange for an equivalent work today which costs about $40,000, without a long-term 5.3% after-fee annual rate of return. On EthiPoint, your philanthropic works will be evaluated and acknowledged with ethical points based on work-adjusted time, so that the points you earn from one hour of good work will always be exchangeable for an hour of any good work with equivalent time value over time. Or maybe you spend about 144 minutes per day on social media like an average internet user worldwide in 2019. Why not just allow yourself a little time for any good causes that you care about? In addition, research shows that volunteering, pro bono, and donation has huge positive impact on human wellbeing, health and life satisfaction. Spending some time doing good may help you end up with less health problems hence less medical expenses in the future too.

You can post good works such as donation, volunteering, pro bono service and charitable grant done or organized by you, for any good causes for human/animal, environment/health, civil/community, education/research, cultural/religion, etc. A benefactor is a person or organization that helps others by giving money or charitable grant, volunteering time or expertise, or organizing those good works for them. A beneficiary is a person or organization that has benefited from volunteering, donation, grant or others' good works, publicly expresses thanks and rewards ethical points to them.

Individual or organizational benefactors such as volunteers, non-anonymous donors, and charities/nonprofits will get acknowledged correspondingly by their organizer/recruiter, donees and any potential beneficiaries. After a good work is publicly posted, if you are a beneficiary you can click "Acknowledge This Good Work" to acknowledge benefactors by transferring ethical points to them; or if you are a benefactor you can click "Share This Good Work Post" to send emails to potential beneficiaries to invite them to acknowledge you.

Either the organization or you can post a good work as an author. Click "Good Work - Post Good Work" on the top navigation bar, select work type of "Organization donated service via volunteers", fill in the organization's username and contributed time into the "organizer/benefactor" and the "work amount" columns, and also usernames of all the participated volunteers (including yourself) and corresponding contributed time into the "volunteer's username and amount of time contributed" column, fill in other information and click "Submit".

Volunteers who volunteered in a good work organized by an organization will be acknowledged by the organizer as well as the end beneficiaries who received the help. If the organization is the post author, it'll be automatically prompted to acknowledge all the volunteers with ethical points. If you, as a volunteer, are the post author, you can share the post with the organization via email to invite it to acknowledge you. Both you and the organization can further share the good work post with end beneficiaries via emails to invite them to acknowledge you and the organization. We suggest searching for existent posts before posting one to see if the good work has already been posted by the organizer or any other volunteer.

Please note that if you have volunteered by applying to volunteer needs posted on EthiPoint (at Search and Apply for Local Volunteer Opportunities), the system will automatically generate good work posts for the needer/organizer to confirm, so that both you and the needer/organizer won't worry about manually inputting information such as contributors and corresponding contributions, etc.

Yes. You just need to upload an image or a file of the donation as evidence when posting your good work on EthiPoint. Click "Good Work - Post Good Work" on the top navigation bar, select work type "Individual or organizations donated money" or "Individual or organization offered charitable grant", indicate the amount of your donated money or grant, fill in other information and click "Submit", and then click "Share This Good Work Post" to email your donees to invite them to acknowledge you. You'll also be informed about your donation's impact and be automatically rewarded when any of your donees further helps others and gets others' acknowledgedment in the future.

It's worth mentioning that, if your donation was made via EthiPoint, our system can automatically generate good work post and acknowledge you for your donation so that you need not manually post your donation work or invite donees to acknowledge you.

No. Users of EthiPoint need to have their active Braintree merchant accounts only if they want to receive online money donations made by other users via EthiPoint platform.

Yes, but the benefactor/organizer and volunteers (if there's any) of the good work must be user(s) of EthiPoint and you need to fill in their username(s) and amount(s) of contribution when posting the good work. By default, the organizer/benefactor of a good work is the same as the author of the post. You'll need to override that default with others' username(s) if the good work is done by them instead of you. And only the organizer/benefactor and volunteers of a good work can get acknowledged.

An email with instructions to activate your account will be sent to your email address once you've submitted the registration form at Register. Please make sure you input your email address correctly in the form. If you didn't receive the account activation email, your email service provider’s mailing software may be blocking it. You can try checking your spam folder or contact us at support9@ethipoint.com.

At the moment, only credit cards payments are acceptable. As we take your credit card data security very seriously, all your card details are handled securely by thrid-party PCI DSS compliant service provider Braintree (a division of PayPal, https://www.braintreepayments.com) and are not stored by us.

EIN is the taxpayer identification information used to identify an organization, and will be publicly displayed on EthiPoint platform. A sole proprietor or a single-member LLC which has no EIN may register as a Personal user instead.

You can earn bonus ethical points by referring others to join EthiPoint platform as users. Log in and visit Refer Friends for details as long as our user referral offer lasts. In addition, the platform will automatically initialize a limited amount of free credit of ethical points to a user's ethical accounts once the user has filled in user profile of taxpayer identification information, so that the user can use ethical points for acknowledging its volunteers or donors before earning any points by itself.