This is the fifth in a series of profiles of Y Combinator Winter 2011 (YC W11) startups.

“Keep the change.” You might say that to a taxi driver who’d delivered you speedily and safely to your destination, but it’s unlikely you’d ever say it to a grocery checkout clerk or a Nieman Marcus salesperson. Yet over time the change on your daily purchases can add up to amounts that would make a significant difference to some group, such as your favorite charity.

In fact, if you use your credit or debit card a few times a day, round up each purchase to the next dollar, and add up the difference, you’ll find that you’re racking up $20 in “change” each month, or $240 per year. At least, that’s the average that SwipeGood, a Y Combinator-backed startup based in Palo Alto, is seeing among its users so far. Its mission is to help people give that money to causes they believe in, and, in the process, to help stabilize the fundraising process for non-profit organizations.

SwipeGood co-founders (top to bottom) Steli Efti, Anthony Nemitz, and Thomas Steinacher

Call it “smallesse” (as opposed to largesse). Signing up with SwipeGood, which tracks your purchases and adds the appropriate roundup amount at the end of each month, is a no-hassle, easy-to-understand way to be a mini-philanthropist. At the startup’s website you can choose to send your change to any of more than 500 non-profit groups, from Kiva.org to KQED. Once you’ve chosen one, your money flows to the recipient automatically, providing it with reliable, subscription-style revenue of the type that’s all too rare in the non-profit world.

SwipeGood keeps 5 percent of the donations to fund its own operations. That’s a lot less than the 10 to 20 percent of the annual budget that goes toward marketing and fundraising at most non-profits, says Steli Efti, one of SwipeGood’s three co-founders. “We thought this would be a way to make fundraising more affordable, and to turn it into month-over-month recurring revenue,” Efti says. “Our whole reason for existence is to provide the simple and most elegant solution for giving.”

Efti and his co-founders Anthony Nemitz and Thomas Steinacher made up one of the 43 startup teams to finish the Winter 2011 term at Y Combinator this spring. Even before the incubator’s Demo Day on March 23, the company had raised $500,000 in seed funding from individual investors such as Bebo co-founder Michael Birch. “We were already making revenue then, so we are looking at a very long runway,” says Efti. “I think we could become profitable in a very short period of time.”

An ethnic Greek who was born and raised in Germany, Efti came to the U.S. three years ago with big dreams. His first startup, Supercool School, built a white-label online education platform that’s now used at 4,000 schools in 43 countries. He thinks SwipeGood, which is already seeing weekly growth in the double-digit percentages, can sign up 10 million U.S. households over the next five years—enough to generate donations of $2 billion per year. That would put it on a par with the Salvation Army, the nation’s second largest charity, which raised $1.7 billion in private support in 2010.

The very same consumers who would balk at donating a set percentage of each purchase to a charity are perfectly happy to give away their change, Efti says. “People are afraid of … Next Page »

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Lots of people put off giving to charity until the last couple days of the year when you can still get the tax deduction (including some of us here at Xconomy). We know this year has been rough, but for those of you who can still give, we put together a list of organizations that aim to strengthen the science and technology skills of young people in our region. It’s not a comprehensive list, so if you have any other suggestions, please post a comment below or send us a note at editors@xconomy.com

Technology Access Foundation (TAF)

—TAF aims to help children of color get the skills they need to join the high-tech workforce. Co-founder Trish Millines Dziko, a former Microsoftie, started this in 1996 as an after-school program to train kids for internships. That success paved the way for TAF’s most ambitious effort yet, a new public school it runs in Federal Way called TAF Academy High School. As we wrote back in September, Millines has a vision of enrolling 4,100 kids in TAF programs across the state by 2016.

Northwest Association for Biomedical Research

—Established in 1988, the Northwest Association for Biomedical Research, based in Seattle, runs programs to improve K-12 science education. It has longstanding programs to help train teachers in biology, as well as help match up students with career scientists who serve as mentors.

Pacific Science Center

—This hotspot at the Seattle Center for lifelong science, math, and technology learning serves a million people a year, and has educational programs that reach all 39 counties in Washington state.

Science & Engineering Business Association

—This student organization at the University of Washington aims to foster the entrepreneurial spirit in science and engineering students. It organized the largest career fair at the UW in October, with more than 140 companies scouting the talent pool.

Technology in Education Trust

—This charity is affiliated with the Seattle-based Technology Alliance, and is set up to support the organization’s public policy research and education outreach work.

Center for Inquiry Science

—This is a Seattle-based program established by the Institute for Systems Biology to improve K-12 science education in Washington state.

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It’s an unofficial tradition in my family to spend the last few days of the year—often New Year’s Eve itself, I’m embarrassed to admit—deciding what charities we’d like to support before the tax-deduction clock resets for another year. So for any of you who are thinking along the same lines this week, and who are fortunate enough to be able to do a little giving at the end of what’s been such a tough year for so many, I thought I would mention a few causes near to Xconomy’s heart. These are all local organizations that are helping give kids and other folks access to the scientific and technological skills and tools they need to participate in the innovation community. The list is by no means exhaustive, and your additions to it are welcome; just post a comment below or drop us a note at editors@xconomy.com.

Computer Clubhouse
Established via a collaboration between the MIT Media Laboratory and Boston’s Computer Museum (which is now part of the Museum of Science), the Computer Clubhouse is a free, safe after-school environment where kids can get access to not only computers but a host of other cool technology and adult mentorship. With support from Intel, the original model has been replicated at 100 locations around the world.

East End House
The East End House’s broad range of services includes free computer classes and an after-school program that, with help from local biotech firms, aims to bolster kids’ understanding of science and their interest in pursuing it as a career.

FIRST Robotics
This is the local outpost of Dean Kamen’s program aimed at encouraging middle and high school students to pursue science and engineering. The program is centered on a giant international robotics competition; the next Boston regional contest will be March 6th and 7th.

Freedom House
The Freedom House provides free access to its computer labs, as well as computer-skills training for seniors.

Margaret Fuller Neighborhood House
In addition to numerous other services, the Margaret Fuller Neighborhood House offers free computer classes and free daily access to its computer lab.

One Laptop Per Child
Founded by Nicholas Negroponte and other veterans of the MIT Media Lab, OLPC wants to ensure that every school-aged child in the developing world has a networked laptop. There are several ways to contribute, including OLPC’s current Give One, Get One (G1G1) program, through which consumers can buy two laptops for $399. One of the computers will be shipped to a school of OLPC’s choice, the other to any recipient that the buyer chooses.

Science Club for Girls –
The name of this organization pretty much nails it—Science Club for Girls provides free after-school programs designed “to increase the self-confidence and science literacy of K-12th grade girls belonging to groups that are underrepresented in the sciences.” (Xconomy is putting its money where its mouth is on this one, by the way: Science Club for Girls is one of the organizations to which we’ll be donating part of the ticket proceeds from our upcoming Battle of the Tech Bands.)

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They say one good deed begets another. Apparently one good charity story also begets another.

The day after Rebecca published her piece last week on Givvy, the Framingham, MA, startup planning to offer online tools to help people track their charitable donations—and the very same day I wrote about Newton, MA, startup Jackpot Rewards, which plans to give away half of its profits to children’s charities—a public relations exec in New York wrote to tips@xconomy.com to let us know about yet another Boston-area company planning to use the power of the Web to orchestrate more effective fundraising for charities. This one is called Good2Gether. And it could prove to be the most powerful of the three, in terms of sheer ability to transform people’s charitable instincts into action.

The Cambridge, MA-based startup is constructing what you might call a “hyperlocal giving aggregator”—an advertising-supported, keyword-based widget designed to appear alongside news stories on the websites of major regional media organizations, where it displays information about local non-profit fundraising campaigns or volunteer opportunities related to each article.

Say you’re living in San Francisco and you’re reading a story in SFGate, the San Francisco Chronicle’s regional Web portal, about a string of tornados striking somewhere in the Midwest. Good2Gether’s widget might give links to a local Red Cross chapter organizing a blood drive to help the victims, or to a local Humane Society chapter collecting money to help displaced pets, while at the same time showing an ad for State Farm insurance.

It’s one of those virtuous circles that the Internet is so good at completing: the non-profits get to make their pitch to a lot of readers, the newspaper website gets some ad revenue, and the advertisers get the glow of being associated with a humanitarian cause. The SFGate example is hypothetical—but the real system is scheduled to go live in eight major media markets this year, starting in Boston in April. (Good2Gether says it can’t yet reveal which Boston media outlet will run the widget, but the San Francisco Chronicle and the Houston Chronicle have already announced that they’ll participate.)

Good2Gether is the brainchild of Gregory McHale, the former CEO of electronic-whiteboard maker Virtual Ink and also the founder of cMarket, a 50-employee Cambridge company that’s the main provider of infrastructure services for the online auctions that thousands of non-profit organizations around the country use these days to raise money. McHale told me that the idea for Good2Gether came from his conversations with cMarket’s users about their frustrations getting the word out about their fundraising and volunteer needs, especially to younger crowds.

“I was meeting with non-profits all the time and listening to them about all the money they have to spend on marketing to their current constituencies, and about their terror about the crew of millennials coming at them just over the horizon,” McHale says. “Millennials,” also known as Generation Y, are young people born between 1980 and 1995; raised on the Internet, these folks are proving unresponsive to the communications channels that non-profits have traditionally used to raise awareness, such as print newspapers, local television, direct mail, and telemarketing.

“So on the one hand, you have lots of non-profits that are trying to reach people, including young people,” says McHale. “On the other hand you have these websites run by newspapers, radio stations, TV stations, college papers, and magazines that have millions of viewers but are desperate for … Next Page »

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Think about the causes that are closest to your heart—the environment? The wellbeing of children? Social justice? The fate of NBC’s critically acclaimed “Friday Night Lights?” Now think about the charitable donations you made last year. Even if you’re one of those incredibly organized people who has already gathered all of his 2007 receipts into neat piles and deposited them with the accountant, chances are you can’t really say just how well, or poorly, your charitable spending aligns with your beliefs and priorities. Givvy founder John Treadway thinks you’d feel better and make better decisions about giving—and ultimately, give more—if you had easy access to that and other information.

Treadway is building Givvy to provide online tools that give individual donors “more control and more empowerment over why, when, where, and how they give to charities.” What does that mean, exactly? I’d love to tell you, but the company is so brand spanking new (as in, founded in December, moved into its office in Framingham, MA, the week before last) that its only product right now is the intriguing, if coy, musings of its founder. (Delivered in person and via the Givvy blog.) Still, Treadway is giving away just enough to that you can imagine a Web portal that might help you plan, track, organize, and analyze your donations. Given the nagging guilt I feel over the fact that most of my own giving is done essentially at whim, usually in response to an over-the-transom appeal that happens to be particularly clever or resonant, I find the idea appealing.

A veteran of product management and business development at firms including Sybase, Powersoft, and Object Design, Treadway spent the last few years working on Digibug, a photography e-commerce services provider that he founded in 2003. When it became clear that the company wasn’t viable (Treadway says it will be sold or folded in the next couple of weeks) he started cooking up his plan for Givvy. The startup’s cofounders, Seth Lipkin and James Andrews, are developers that Treadway knew from his Digibug days. Givvy is operating on a bootstrap so far, Treadway says, and plans to try to drum up about half a million dollars in seed financing once the alpha version of its technology is ready, which should be next month.

Treadway promises to make more concrete details public once he’s produced something that people can get their hands on, but in the meanwhile he shared a few more tidibits: Givvy will target a broad audience of givers including “Xs, Ys, Zs, and boomers,” he says. It will incorporate lots of Web 2.0 features—user generated content, comments, and the like—as well as much of the same sort of tax data on charitable organizations that sites like Guidestar.org offer for would-be donors looking to peek under nonprofits’ hoods. But at Givvy’s core, Treadway says, will be very specific tools for “people who want to get a lot more systematic about how and what and where and why.”

There’s that “why” again. I told Treadway that when he says Givvy is helping people understand, among other things, why they’re giving, it almost sounds like therapy. “We can call it charity therapy,” he allows. Very wealthy individuals, he points out, often have lengthy conversations with their advisors about how they want to shape their financial legacy. “Why can’t the average person have the same thought process and discussion about what they want their legacy to be?” Treadway asks. “We expect it will be therapeutic, though that’s not the intention,” he adds. “But we want people to look back at the end of the year and feel good about what they’ve done.”

Treadway is, of course, saying close to nothing about how Givvy intends to make money amidst all this giving and feeling good. “I can tell you one way we’re not going to make money—we’re not going to touch a dime of the donations that go through the system,” he says. Beyond that, all he’ll cop to is the general notion that there are three ways to make money online: ads, subscription or user fees, and commerce. “It will be in one or more of those three categories that we will make money,” he says.

Givvy will be ready for a controlled beta test by the end of the second quarter, Treadway says. Meanwhile, I’m off to think about whether I’ve really been putting my charitable money where my public-health-concerned mouth is. Now where did I put those receipts?

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