For a slightly different Christmas present idea, consider getting a number lit up on The Darfur Wall. The idea is that there are 400,000 numbers covering 40 panels which each number representing a person killed in Darfur. One dollar lights up a number of your choosing and each remaining dollar goes to light up another random number. You can name your number with the donator’s name or if it’s a gift, the giftee’s.

They are a registered charity and distribute 100%* of the donations (after PayPal has taken their processing fees) to the following organisations:

* Unlike One Pixel at a Time where they charge $4/pixel for over 3 million pixels and you can only purchase in minimums of 5. If you read the fine (and greyed out) print they donate only 80% to Living Beyond Breast Cancer, a registered charity, and admit that they are a for-profit organisation. If they make the target then that’s US$2,400,000 profits, after paying any hosting bills, that’s quite a bit of profit. I don’t begrudge an organisation’s need for a certain amount of admin costs and to reasonably pay staff, but if it’s only for a good cause and not to make a tidy profit, why not just register as a charity as the Dafur Foundation has? I’m just surprised how much publicity they’ve got and why no one seems to have asked or explained where the 20% is going.