Shannon and I recently decided that we would ask each other, our friends, and family to not buy us gifts for any special occasion. Our lives are already cluttered by too much stuff, and we don’t need any more of it.

That said, we don’t want to ruin everyone’s fun. So, if anyone insists on spending money to honor us or show their affection, we encourage them to do it by making a donation. We helped raise money for The City of Hope (the cancer research center that gave Shannon more priceless years to spend with her mother) when we got married.

Now we have a wider variety of options available to us thanks to Changing the Present, which is a non-profit that allows people to give gifts in the form of specific donations to charities.

In honor of our 1st anniversary, I used Changing the Present to buy a bike for a girl in Cambodia to help her get to school. It’s a tribute to Shannon’s lifelong devotion to education and how I’m trying to guilt her into riding her bike all the time. It also makes me all misty thinking about how my nieces are starting their education.

Oh, and there’s always the added bonus of being able to write about how awesome I am for doing it on my blog.

Anyway, I got to interview Robert Tolmach from Changing the Present a few weeks ago for NetSquared. I loved what he had to say, so I’m reproducing some of the interview here. Enjoy!

Can you tell me about how Changing The Present got started?

Robert Tolmach: Changing the Present is a new kind of non-profit website for people who want to make a difference, and it makes giving more rewarding by letting you choose exactly what you want to accomplish. So, instead of just writing a check to a non-profit, which is perfectly fine, you get that emergent satisfaction, for instance, that you can preserve an acre of the Rain Forest, you can fund an hour of cancer research, you can provide a child her first books so she learns how to read.

For $60.00, you can restore a blind person's eyesight with cataract surgery. There are thousands of these donation opportunities, donation gifts from hundreds of leading non-profits, addressing a full range of causes. We hope that this makes giving more rewarding and will give people more awareness of the problems that exist in the world and their opportunity to do something real about them. We hope it encourages people to give more. But also, one of the key elements of the site is that we encourage people to give these donation gifts in a friend's name, instead of buying a traditional present.

At the same time, none of the non-profits have enough money, and we're all passionate about our favorite cause. We're spending 250 billion dollars a year in this country alone, buying presents for each other. We've all given and received some great presents, but we've also all given and received some not so necessary ones. A lot of people just don't want any more stuff, so, you don't have to buy stuff to show your love. Another way to show your love is do something meaningful in a friend's name.

By offering these very tangible donation opportunities, we think it's more rewarding and meaningful for both the gift giver and the recipient. We have Wish Lists and registries so people can let their friends know what it is they really much care about, and it insures just the perfect gift. We also have personalized printed greeting cards so you can write or choose a caption and write your message inside. The card we mail out for you includes a photograph, a description of the gift you gave, so it's very real to the recipient exactly what you've done. And people are using this for wedding registries.

One couple recently created a wedding registry about a week ago. 141 donations had been made in their name. And they thought that was a more meaningful way to celebrate their love and their lives coming together than more gravy boats, blenders and whatever. It's wonderful. Together, they and their friends made a big difference in the world. We're never going to put Bloomingdale's out of business, don't quote me on that, but the 250 billion dollars a year in gift money would be a lot of new money for non-profits.

My wife and I had the same impulse. There's only so much we wanted to register for, so we had a lot of guests donate for us. What's really nice is knowing we can do this for all sorts of events, for all sorts of different causes, and that you're formalizing it.

You can stand on the street corner and admonish people to do it, but unless you make it easy and rewarding, convenient and tangible, giving them a way to express and share it with their friends, it's hard to compete with so many different companies and retailers who work very hard to do just that.

How many non-profits do you have on board now?

I think there are about 300 or so, though you can give to any of half a million non-profits. We have a database of all the public charities that file a tax return, and there are about a half million of them. You can give to any of them. You add any of them to Wish Lists, you can add any of them to registries, create a fund-raising drive and raise money for any of them. If you give a donation in someone's name, you can send them a greeting card about it. But, the number that currently have tangible donation gifts on the site with pictures is currently about 300 and growing.

Any non-profit that's a public charity can come to the site and click the tab that says, "For non-profits," sign up and avail themselves of all these tools. The cost to the non-profit is $100.00 a year, really cheap. The only cost beyond that is the transaction fee which is just a standard credit card fee, it's three percent or 30 cents just to cover our out of pocket expense of processing it. If they took the donation on their own website, they would pay the same and if they took it through a lot of other donation portals, they would pay more.

One of the things I want to make very clear in this interview is that I want non-profits to know that they're all welcome to come to the site and use all the tools to capture some of this gift money&and use the banner, widgets, everything else, encouraging members to help raise money for the organization. It's very much the social media approach, right? And start spreading the word, promoting this idea of the donation gift, the charitable gift, instead of buying more stuff. We provide those tools to make it easy.

Changing the Present is a non-profit?

Changingthepresent.org is the website of a 501-C3 non-profit. So, when you're donating, you're donating to it with the instructions to pass your money through to Unicef, for instance. You're further instructing them to use it as you specified for the blankets, not books, for the kids. When they sign up on the site and list their donation gifts, they agree in advance that they will use the money for that purpose, so you give with total confidence. You know exactly where the money's going, exactly what's being done with it and exactly what it will accomplish.

Can you tell me about how you've marketed the site so far?

Yeah, it's a number of things. Some of it is we're running banner ads that have been donated from a whole bunch of different websites. Some of it is non-profits that are sending members to us because this is probably the best opportunity for them to capture some of their share of that 250 billion dollars in gift money. Statistically, their members spend more money buying presents than they donate to non-profits each year. Americans spend 250 billion dollars a year on presents, and individuals donated 232 billion, so pretty close.

Some of the non-profits recognize that there's an opportunity to capture their share of that money by making sure that their members and supporters know about this opportunity. The smart ones tell the non-profit, their supporters, "Go to the site, create a Wish List, create a registry, and let your friends know that you would welcome a donation to our organization in lieu of more stuff. And when you're giving gifts, keep us in mind."

So, that's another way that we give some exposure. There's been a good amount of press. We get a wonderful response. The New York Times referred to us as "the Amazon.com of non-profits." Oprah Magazine, Kiplinger.com, Motley Fool, Parenting.com, Huffington Post, repeatedly, it goes on and on. We've been getting this wonderful, warm, loving response from a bunch of publications. We get a little bit of television, a lot of blogs, and that's really heartening.

How did you get the idea, how did you get into it?

I used to be an architect and real estate developer. I had a long-term personal belief that you have to do something meaningful in life. I discovered when I was in my teens I wasn't going to be a doctor as my father is because I don't like blood and guts. I'm not patient enough to be a teacher, nor noble enough to be a social worker. And what do you do?

I was really moved by my hero, Bill Drayton, and the whole concept of social entrepreneurship, of going to find a problem and fix it, build or change a system. I used to be an architect, and what architects do is they design systems, right? Build a new system of how to do all these different activities and pieces come together and how do you fit into the larger system of your fabric? And what real estate developers do is they martial resources to make things happen. Those are the two things that I do now, but in this realm.

In particular, Changing the Present came about in conversations with a friend, named Steve Spiegel, a lawyer who used to be at Skadden Arps, who's now the Chairman of Important Gifts, a non-profit that owns Changing the Present. One of the things we talked about was "Gee, none of these non-profits have enough money and what do you get as presents?" There are a few non-profits that make giving meaningful by making it tangible and then, starting to tap a little bit of that 250 billion of gift money. But, what you really need to make that happen or to facilitate it and to promote it as a service more is you need a system with all these different elements that I alluded to earlier.

And so, we started putting the pieces together and we got wonderful people on the Board of Advisors; it's an amazing group. It's Bill Drayton from Ashoka, Alex Counts from Grameen, Susan Davis from all sorts of things, the head of Sesame Workshop, Sierra Club and the Rain Forest Alliance. It's an amazing group, about 125 very prominent leaders from the non-profit world. We worked with them to hone the idea and figure out what are our prominent causes, what are the issues we want to address within each, and which non-profits do we want to invite?

We've similarly had a lot of great input from people in the business world and the web world, people like Esther Dyson, the Internet luminary. And like any creative venture, it gets its changes as you work on the design and progresses. There are still a lot of things we're planning on adding and modifying. What you see now is just where we are at this step of the process. It's not by any means, the end.

Well, that's really inspiring, to come from architecture into web development.

One of the nice things about the web is compared to buildings, it's much faster, much less expensive, and you can change it and move a column. You can keep adding on. You don't have to worry about there not being any more land.

Right, it's much less resource-intensive!

If you figure out a way to use this wonderful technology and social medium, it's also a really powerful medium for social change.

What have been the more popular charities that you've seen so far? What's getting the greatest response?

I've never looked to see which non-profit gets the most money or which gift item gets the most. If we had more resources, we'd spend time analyzing it more I'm sure than a retailer would. But right now, we're so busy doing everything else that it is what it is. The real point isn't what's the most popular; the real point is when you come to the site, you will find something you really find meaningful. When your next-door neighbor and your sister and your father come, so will they because whether they care about animal welfare or human rights, Veterans, cancer or AIDS, you name it, it's here, with really compelling stories and pictures. The stories are of the problem, putting in context why you might care about this.

Here's the opportunity, here's what the gift does: A problem in one case, many girls in Africa don't get to attend school because they simply don't have shoes. The roads are really hot and uncomfortable. They say you get hookworm from walking barefoot. In a lot of schools, you're ostracized and not even allowed to attend if you don't have shoes. There are girls who simply don't have shoes and can't attend school because of that. That's the problem that's defined on the site. The gift says for $14.00, you can provide a girl a pair of shoes, so she can attend school, get an education, and totally change her life for 14 bucks! OK, I'll take two. For $14.00 a pair, I'd take two pair!