Word on the street: Nextdoor will launch donation feature to help specific charities

Yahoo Finance's On the Move panel discuss the latest headline making news stories.

Video Transcript

ADAM SHAPIRO: Dan Howley, in this age of working from home, you can have a garage sale from home, and NextDoor has news about how you can pay it forward, right?

DAN HOWLEY: Yes, NextDoor, basically the social network for real neighborhoods, has a new feature that they're rolling out. It's called NextDoor Sell for Good. And basically what you're able to do is go into NextDoor-- when you go to sell something or even give it away, it's going to give you the option to donate that to different charities that may need a leg up. So for instance, you go in, list a chair for $50, you say that you want the proceeds for that to go to a specific charity. You sell the chair, and then that money goes from a specific PayPal account directly to that charity. So you'll also get a receipt, giving a tax redemption slip for you.

And it's really something that they said that they'd seen a huge increase in demand for from people looking to donate. They say that conversations about donations are up 7x on this platform. They also list $2 billion worth of goods a month in that free or for sale section on NextDoor. So obviously, a lot of items there that can be going to people-- and as I browsed it, after speaking with the folks at NextDoor, I could find a number of items saying, you know, free to essential workers or, you know, reduced price or looking for donations.

So I think this is something we're going to continue to see from a lot of different types of social networks, but specifically from NextDoor. It really is nice to see.

JULIE HYMAN: It's interesting, Dan, because I found, sort of anecdotally, that a lot of organizations that don't normally take donations of stuff-- that normally take donations of some are not taking it right now because of concerns about spread of coronavirus. So I wonder how that'll play into all of this.

DAN HOWLEY: Yeah, so I specifically asked them that-- you know, a lot of people not necessarily want to be, you know, going to meet strangers or, you know, on top of each other, you know, handing off money. So they do have a cashless option or a contactless payment option. You can also set it up where, you know, you can drop something at someone's front door and let them know that it's there. You can kind of bring it over to them, show them what you might want to be giving away, and then they can take a look and say they want to take it or not.

So they did kind of explain that there are ways around this. But in this kind of climate, it is difficult to really fully socially distance yourself if you're trying to do something along these lines.