2026-07-14 · Raiden Team
On Raiden you don't pick a charity. You set a giving split: percentage allocations across up to five charities, adding up to exactly 100%. That split is the standing instruction for where your share of each week's pot should go, and you can change it whenever you like. It's a small design decision that turns out to matter a lot, so it's worth explaining properly.
Most people don't care about exactly one thing. You might care about a local food bank, ocean cleanup, and a disease that's touched your family — and forcing you to rank those and keep only the winner is a strange thing for software to demand. A split lets your giving look like your actual priorities: 45% here, 35% there, 20% there.
There's a quieter benefit too. When people are forced into one pick, they tend to default to the biggest, most famous option, because a single choice feels high-stakes. A split lowers the stakes on each line. It's much easier to give a small local organization 15% of your allocation than 100% of it, and small organizations are usually the ones where marginal dollars matter most.
Your percentages must total exactly 100. Not roughly — exactly. This isn't fussiness; it's how we keep a promise we've made elsewhere: money is never left undirected. When the weekly distribution runs, your slice of the pot is divided by your percentages, and because they cover the whole 100%, every part of your slice has a destination. There's no remainder that falls to a default we chose for you, and no gap where money sits unassigned.
Five is the cap because splits are instructions, and instructions you can't remember aren't instructions. Five lines is enough to reflect real, plural priorities; twenty lines is a spreadsheet you'll never look at again.
The split is editable whenever you want, and the edit takes effect going forward — each week's distribution uses the allocations in place when it runs. Your priorities in January don't have to be your priorities in June. A disaster happens and you want to shift 25% toward relief for a while; a cause you loved wraps up its campaign; you discover an organization you didn't know existed. Adjusting your split is a thirty-second edit, not a commitment ceremony.
The directory behind the picker is Every.org's, covering more than one million U.S. 501(c)(3) organizations, each identified by its IRS-issued EIN. We've written before about why that matters: names can be imitated, EINs can't. When you add a charity to your split, you're pointing at a specific federally registered entity, not whichever organization happens to share a name with it. That's also why the tiny nonprofit down the street is just as available to you as the famous one — the EIN does the verifying, so nobody has to hand-curate an approved list.
Some practical advice, since a split works best when it's stable enough that you're not fiddling with it weekly:
Start with what you'd defend out loud. If a friend asked why each organization is on your list, you should have an answer. That test alone usually gets you to three to five causes.
Mix scales. One big, proven organization; one local one where you can see the work; maybe one cause that's personal. Different scales of giving do different jobs, and a split lets you hold all of them at once.
Don't over-optimize the numbers. The difference between 30/30/40 and 33/33/34 is not worth agonizing over. Round numbers you understand beat precise numbers you invented under pressure.
Revisit on a rhythm, not on impulse. A couple of times a year, look at the list and ask if it still describes you. Change it when your answer changes — not every time a headline moves you, and not never.
One more thing, for honesty's sake: Raiden is in founding preview, so the weekly distributions your split directs are currently projections — an exact accounting of what the model would send where, before real money moves. Your split is still worth setting carefully now. It's the standing instruction the whole system reads, and when giving goes live, it's already pointing where you meant it to.
Join Raiden — turn your scrolling into giving