Here’s the campaign for Give A Mile which helps bring people together for their last moments of life, using miles so that airfare isn’t the reason someone dies alone. (I am on the board of Give A Mile, and many of you have generously supported them with miles donations, thank you!)

Give a Mile has just a day left to achieve its goal of raising one million MileagePlus miles, and this is an opportunity for every mile you donate to be matched by United.

What I love about this is with loyalty program charitable programs I never really know whether my mileage donations will increase the total support for the charity. Is the airline going to give the same number of miles to the charity regardless, and so my ‘donation’ is just burning liability off of their balance sheet? Not so here.

• With United’s donations platform, the airline isn’t normally supporting the charity at all. Instead the charity is able to raise miles on United’s platform – every mile you donate goes directly to the charity.

• And since United isn’t normally supporting the charity, each mile they’re matching really is incremental. You donate a mile, and United adds a mile they wouldn’t otherwise have given.

And they’ll match miles not just for the Give A Mile campaign but also for the rest of the charities raising miles on the United platform. Choose the charity you support, based on groups actually seeking miles (that get deposited into an account for them to redeem real award tickets against), this isn’t a ‘corporate charity program’ it’s something much better than what other loyalty programs offer – the ability for real charities to raise miles from members rather than through a corporate partnership with the airline meant to burnish the airline’s image. Kudos to United for doing this.