Shadow Donation

Published by Whole Whale

The register

RoundUp.org

RoundUp.org links a donor's card to one nonprofit and charges the rounded-up amount monthly; the money goes to Our Change Foundation, a donor-advised fund, which grants it on. Its public sitemap listed 1,809,242 nonprofit URLs on 2026-09-22, and its own nonprofit page says every IRS-qualified 501(c)(3) already has a listing. RoundUp.org, Inc and Our Change Foundation are both registered in California.

Tier
Listed
Operator
RoundUp.org, Inc (FEIN 33-1870778)
Payouts via
Our Change Foundation (EIN 86-3353394), the donor-advised fund of Change (getchange.io)
Platform
www.roundup.org
Scale
1,809,242 nonprofit URLs in public sitemap (1,795,060 unique), as of 22 Sep 2026
Checked
6 of 6 checks · 6 on dated evidence
Evidence
Bundle on file, captured 2026-09-22 · 182 hashed files · 22 screenshots

The checklist

What we have checked on RoundUp.org, what we found, and what it rests on.

  1. Present
    1. Off-domain Present

    Listings are served at roundup.org/nonprofits/<slug>, and their JSON-LD sets the organization url to the RoundUp page.

    Basis: Dated evidence bundle
  2. Present
    2. Auto-generated Present

    RoundUp's for-nonprofits page states that all IRS-qualified 501(c)(3)s already have a listing page, and every sitemap entry carries the same 2026-04-01 lastmod.

    Basis: Dated evidence bundle
  3. Present
    3. No consent Present

    Red Cross, Feeding America, LCFA and To Be Heard listings were captured unclaimed with a live donate button; nonprofits are told they need not sign up.

    Basis: Dated evidence bundle
  4. Present
    4. Takes gifts Present

    Unclaimed listings showed a live Start Rounding Up button that links a donor's card to that organization.

    Basis: Dated evidence bundle
  5. Present
    5. Intermediary Present

    Gifts are subject to Our Change Foundation's exclusive control and discretion; for a qualified organization that never registers, the Terms state only that OCF will send it a letter.

    Basis: Dated evidence bundle
  6. Present
    6. Search-indexed Present

    Exposure, not ranking: the sitemap lists 1,809,242 nonprofit URLs, the saved listings carry a self-canonical and no noindex meta tag, and Moz found 289 listings among its 500 top crawled pages; Google indexing and ranking were not measured.

    Basis: Dated evidence bundle

Event log

Everything that has happened on the record, newest first.

  1. Capture

    Evidence bundle captured

    Whole Whale captured listings, Terms, the for-nonprofits page, 78 sitemaps and screenshots by anonymous public GET, plus a separate SEO and geo-directory bundle.

    Source: RoundUp evidence bundles
  2. Finding

    Registered in California

    California's registry lists RoundUp.org, Inc as a commercial fundraiser (FP0004426) and Our Change Foundation as a charity (CT0281479); a control query returned its row in the same session.

    Source: CA registry search captures
  3. Published

    Added to page 4950

    RoundUp.org was added to the NNF Shadow Donation Directory from captures made that day.

    Source: NNF Shadow Donation Directory footer
  4. Finding

    Sitemap entries share one date

    All 1.8M nonprofit URLs in the sitemap carry lastmod 2026-04-01, changefreq weekly and priority 0.5.

    Source: RoundUp sitemap census
  5. Finding

    Current product live by this date

    A Wayback Machine capture from 2025-04-15 shows the current offer to send spare change to any nonprofit.

    Source: RoundUp investigation README

If your organization is on RoundUp.org

RoundUp's Terms describe a removal process: a written request is verified within three business days and honoured within three more.

RoundUp.org’s removal page

Reply and corrections

RoundUp.org can reply to anything on this page by writing to letstalk@wholewhale.com. We publish replies and log corrections with the date they were made.