Collection boxes for charity

The coin or collection boxes placed by charitable organisations/ NGOs in most retail outlets is a common sight. To the extent that I feel that they have become blind spots in most cases. Would like to share a few thoughts about these.

1. I dont see this in most corporate retail chains. Is it that they do not support such charity or is it that getting permission is too difficult. Whatever the reason, this seems to be missing in these stores.

2. These boxes are an excellent way of fulfilling corporate social responsibility and can also be leveraged to overcome the lack of change. Instead of handing out toffees and chocolates, the cashier can have a small pre-printed slip of paper which has space for Name, Bill Number and the amount to be donated. The change due to the customer can be mentioned as the amount and dropped into the box, with the customers signature. Individually these might be a few paise each. But imagine the overall total when you apply the power of collective effort! All the charity would have to do is hand over these slips with a statement to collect the money.

Of course the truly evolved way of doing this would be to enable the customer to pay the donation at the cash till along with their bill and the charity gets the amount every week or month.

Hopefully someone would think about this and we should be able to channelise the change towards deserving people instead of taking toffees home!!