After President Trump’s election, Time magazine revealed that the number of people donating to organizations such as the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and Planned Parenthood has escalated to extraordinary heights.   As the surge of donations continues, people start to get a little more creative with their methods of donating.

Nathan Pryor, a Vancouver-based computer technician, had a brilliant idea when his friend complained to him about the current U.S. government. She wanted a way to be able to donate to the ACLU with a push of a button. This would lead to Pryor taking her request quite literally. Now, instead of ordering items from Amazon’s online catalog, Pryor has reprogrammed the Dash Button to donate five dollars to the ACLU.

The Amazon Dash button is a device that is linked to the owner’s bank account and, when pushed, purchases whatever household item it is programmed to from Amazon. Pryor explains in an article on Medium, “an [Amazon] Dash Button could be hacked and subverted into performing other tasks.” In this case its new task is donation.  In an interview with NBC, Pryor expressed, “If 10,000 people pushed to donate within 10 minutes of a policy announcement, the organization would have a new perspective on what mattered to its donors.” In January alone, the ACLU has raised approximately $24.1 million due to a disgruntled public that shows no signs of slowing down.

Pryor is not the only one to capitalize on the recent events involving our new government. T3, a marketing company located in Austin, Texas, launched its latest project involving the Commander in Chief. T3 has created a robot, called the “Trump and Dump,” that investigates President Trump’s Twitter feed. Whenever he tweets a negative thought about a publicly traded company, it short sells that company’s stock. Basically, the robot places a bet in T3’s name that the price of stock for the company will go down as an effect of the tweet. According to T3’s President, Ben Gaddis, T3 has successfully made a profit from the “Trump and Dump” in three of the four attempts it has made.  The company has decided to donate the income of the robot to the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (ASPCA). “When a negative tweet goes out and has a negative impact on that company’s stock, something positive comes out of it,” Gaddis explains in an interview with CNN.  The company’s goal seems to be promoting generosity and fighting for their beliefs by donating to charity.

The effects of the election have resulted in thousands of citizens donating to charities and their methods have once again been creative. Vice President Mike Pence has publicly announced that he is “interested in doing what we can, in the balance of this fiscal year, to end public funding of Planned Parenthood, specifically.”  In response to this statement, people all over the country have been donating to Planned Parenthood in Mike Pence’s name.  Donors have even gone so far as to use Pence’s address in the donation so he will receive the certificate of donation at his office. According to CNN News, the Planned Parenthood of Indiana and Kentucky (Indiana is Pence’s home state) has received 1,400 donations post-election and PPINKs Communications Director Ali Slocum has revealed that almost 90 percent of the donations have been made under Pence’s name.

The urgency to donate is stemming from uncertainty about whether the government will continue to fund organizations like Planned Parenthood and the ACLU. The creativity of individuals like Nathan Pryor is spreading like wildfire throughout the nation. These actions are viewed as a way to peacefully protest the government through donating to organizations that share the same beliefs as the American donating. Technology is allowing these people to create their own impact, and to help themselves.

Pryor’s project started as wishful thinking, and technology allowed it to become reality.  Pryor’s project then inspired others to follow suit. For example, according to NBC, a coder named Michael Arthur Aguirre noticed Pryor’s invention and quickly started producing his own ACLU Dash Buttons, he even began to offer them to his friends via Facebook.

Additionally, the idea to donate to Planned Parenthood in Mike Pence’s name started with one person on Twitter and suddenly became a phenomenon.  This goes to show that in this day and age, donating and protesting have taken on a new form through technology.