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Amazon Smile Program Helps Fund ATDC Amazon is an expansive on-line department store, hobby store, music store, dive shop, and grocery store to cite a few areas. It is also a generous charity, though few people know much about that aspect. Called the Amazon Smile program, you can purchase whatever you want from Amazon and have half a percent of the purchase price donated to a charity of your choice. I believe the charity must be one that has an email address. To do this you have to first designate your charity—I picked our dive club—then log into Amazon using a very slightly different address: www.smile.amazon.com. Once logged in, there is no difference in your online shopping experience except that now a small portion of your purchase price goes to the identified charity. You can see the total amount generated by your purchases and the total for the charity. Amazon says it sends the donations to the charities quarterly. This is a great way to generate additional income for the club. I asked our treasurer, Helga, if she had a record of how much money ATDC has received through the Amazon Smile program. She prepared the following table showing the dollar amount we have received annually since 2015, as well as computing the fraction of club income for that year.

Year	Smile Income	Other Income	Percentage
2015	$12.93	$2,556	0.38
2016	$16.92	$3,358	0.44
2017	$69.57	$3,833	2.29
2018	$53.81	$2,572	1.16
2019	$48.60	$4,574	1.66
2020	$77.86	$2,875	1.88
2021	$97.58	$4,054	4.85
2022	$70.92*	$1,915	3.57*

* As of November 2022

You can see that it is a small but growing source of funds to us—due to Amazon’s generosity. *As of November 2022 Now I admit it’s not a lot of money—at its greatest, the donation was almost 5% of our annual income—but I buy on Amazon all the time and it doesn’t cost me anything to have a portion of my purchase price go to ATDC. So if you routinely buy things from Amazon, I encourage you to check out the Smile program.

Editors note:
To sign up for Amazon smile, you can do the following:
1- Visit smile.amazon.com
2- Sign into your amazon account.
3- Either press "get started" or follow the prompts to choose your charity
- In the "pick your own charitable organization" box, enter "aqua tutus" and press search.
- Press "select" next to Aqua Tutus Diving Inc.
Every time you shop on Amazon, you need to visit smile.amazon.com.