By Patty Courtright
San Francisco

Donating to charity is becoming business as usual. With the proliferation of online giving opportunities, people can contribute to the charity of their choice at the click of a mouse. One socially conscious company has gone a step further in making it easy to give.

Customers of San Francisco-based Working Assets make charitable contributions every time they log onto the Internet, use their credit cards or make long-distance calls. The company earmarks a portion of each customer's monthly bill for charity and, since 1985, has donated more than $16 million to nonprofit groups working for human rights, peace, education, equality and the environment.

What's more, Working Assets' 400,000 customers nominate prospective recipients and vote annually to decide how contributions are distributed.

The principle is simple, explains Haig Yaghoobian, vice president of business services.

Working Assets offers its customers a variety of personal and business services, all of which have ties to charity. For its Visa and MasterCard customers, the company donates 10 cents per transaction to nonprofit groups. Long-distance customers see 1 percent of their monthly charges benefit charity.

The same is true for Internet access. Partnering with EarthLink Network, Working Assets offers a package of Internet services and donates 1 percent of customers' monthly bills to various nonprofits.

"It's a kind of painless generosity," Yaghoobian says.

At the end of 1998, Working Assets donated $3.3 million to 50 nonprofit groups, including Amnesty International, Equality Now, Greenpeace, League of Conservation Voters, National Center for Family Literacy, Children's Defense Fund, Second Harvest, Gay and Lesbian Alliance and Handgun Control.

The slate of recipients is subject to change annually. Each year, an independent foundation evaluates several hundred nominees before Working Assets' employees and board of directors make the final selection, narrowing the ballot to 50 groups - up from 40 in previous years. The customers then vote on how to distribute the donations among the groups.

Socially conscious

Working Assets is the brainchild of investment bankers Peter Barnes, Drummond Pike and Michael Kieschnick.

In the early 1980s, the three devised one of the first mutual funds specifically for people who wanted to invest their money in socially responsible companies, Yaghoobian says.

"A few years into it, they decided there were other things they could do to serve the public good," he says.

Around 1986, the company began issuing what is known as an affinity credit card, where a portion of the amount customers charge goes to charity, Yaghoobian says. When the credit cards became successful, that arm of Working Assets split from the Citizens Funds mutual funds and later branched into long-distance and Internet service as well.

At each step in its development, the company has retained its commitment to progressive politics and activism while aiding a variety of nonprofits.

Politically active

Besides acting as a funding source, Working Assets provides a political forum for its customers to voice their opinions.

Included in their monthly bills, the company's long-distance customers receive alerts on civic, environmental or equality issues. Customers who want to take action can communicate with key decision-makers, whose names are included in the alerts. They can send a personalized letter with the click of a mouse or can make up to two five-minute phone calls a day, with Working Assets picking up the tab.

In addition to these National Citizen Actions, Working Assets has established the Flash Activist Network, where people can choose to be notified of key events by phone, fax or e-mail. To respond, they call the toll-free number, then press a button to be transferred to the responsible decision-maker. If they prefer, people can choose to send a personalized fax instead. Network members pay a monthly fee for the service.

Working Assets' political and civic commitment often takes a national perspective. For example, during the recent presidential impeachment hearings, the company provided support to People for the American Way and MoveOn.org, both of whom encouraged citizens to call their Congressional representatives and ask that President Clinton be censured, then move on to other legislative matters.

Working Assets provided the toll-free numbers to Capitol Hill and the telecommunications infrastructure, including arrangements for using the Internet, to handle the calls, Yaghoobian says.

"During an eight-day period, nearly 300,000 people called on these lines we set up - arguably the largest citizen action lobby ever," he says.

These calls - plus others on issues as diverse as global warming, child-care funding and environmental preservation - combined with responses through the Citizen Action Program and Flash Activist Network, added up to 1.3 million citizen responses in 1998, he says.

Patty Courtright can be reached at
pcourtright@mindspring.com