A core part of ShopForTerra's model is that 30 percent of our total revenue is donated to a small, vetted list of environmental organizations. This article walks through how organizations get on that list, why we use unrestricted funding rather than directing spending, and where to verify which organizations are currently receiving the share.
How an organization gets on the list
We start from a small set of criteria:
- Registered nonprofit status with a clear public mission in one of our focus areas: climate, ocean, wildlife, forests, clean energy, or sustainable agriculture.
- Publicly available annual reporting — annual report or financial summary on the organization's website.
- A track record — established long enough to have produced audited financials at least once.
- Independent of corporate influence — organizations whose governance is not dominated by a single commercial sponsor.
The full list of active organizations is published on our Organizations page, alongside each organization's current revenue share percentage and total amount received to date. The list is small on purpose: with a small list, the donations actually move the needle on each organization's annual budget. Spreading too thin defeats the point.
Why unrestricted funding
When we send a donation to a partner organization, it's unrestricted — they decide how to use it, not us. We do this for two reasons.
The first is that the people running the work know better than we do where the marginal dollar is most useful in any given year. Directing donations from afar sounds like smart giving but in practice it adds administrative overhead at the receiving organization and ties up their staff in compliance with our preferences rather than their own priorities.
The second reason is internal: if we controlled how the donation was spent, project selection would become another place where our product recommendations could be quietly influenced. A retailer might lobby to 'direct' our donations toward projects that align with their marketing. Keeping the donation unrestricted removes that lever entirely.
How the split within the list works
The 30 percent donation share is split among the active organizations on the list according to the revenue share percentage on each. Those percentages are visible on the Organizations page and add up to 100 percent of the donation share.
The numbers are deliberately uneven. We weight toward organizations whose work most directly affects home energy use and efficiency outcomes, since that's the category our shoppers are most often engaging with. A charity focused on home energy retrofits for low-income households generally gets a larger share than a wildlife rehabilitation center, even though both are valuable — the portfolio is meant to reflect the shopping context.
Verifying it
The Transparency page keeps a running tally of total revenue earned and an estimate of the donated-to-date figure. The Organizations page shows the revenue share split we use and the cumulative amounts received. The numbers update from real click and donation data rather than static screenshots.
If you want to donate directly rather than through ShopForTerra, every organization on the list has a website linked from the Organizations page; we actively encourage that. The ShopForTerra donation is meant to be additive to direct giving, not a substitute for it.
How an organization joins
We don't take applications from organizations directly — the list is curated by the ShopForTerra team based on the criteria above. If you work for an organization that fits the criteria and would like to be considered, contact us through the site and we'll take a look. The list changes slowly, and adding a new partner usually means reducing another partner's share, so we don't add organizations lightly.