I'd encourage you to ask the shelter how much they get from Amazon Smile. My guess is it's $200-300 max, which is barely enough to save a single cat.
Worse, there is a well-known phenomenon [1] where if people's "guilt" is taken away, then they are less likely to donate overall. That is, for at least some portion of people, they probably mark a small charity as their Amazon Smile recipient and then think "Great, I'm donating to charity!", not realizing their donations are like 50 cents. But if they didn't sign up for Amazon Smile they might be more likely to actually donate a real amount.
To be clear, I'm all for small charities getting money, but I'd almost rather it be like a lottery or something so a smaller number of small charities could get money they could actually do something with.
Worse, there is a well-known phenomenon [1] where if people's "guilt" is taken away, then they are less likely to donate overall. That is, for at least some portion of people, they probably mark a small charity as their Amazon Smile recipient and then think "Great, I'm donating to charity!", not realizing their donations are like 50 cents. But if they didn't sign up for Amazon Smile they might be more likely to actually donate a real amount.
To be clear, I'm all for small charities getting money, but I'd almost rather it be like a lottery or something so a smaller number of small charities could get money they could actually do something with.
1. https://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/15/books/chapters/freakonomi...