Late last week, Rosita Cortez (herself a confessed Apple fan) took a hard look at Apple's performance in the realm of "giving back":

Apple’s lack of philanthropic contributions, whether cash or in-kind donations, to social causes is creating an uproar in the nonprofit community. It’s not just Apple’s policy barring iPhone and iPad applications from soliciting donations, but the lack of grants, discounts and special pricing for nonprofits on Apple’s products.

Cortez then lists several of Apple's very generous peers in the high-tech bluechips arena, and shows that in many ways Apple is the Ebenezer Scrooge of Silicon Valley.

Personally, I think stacking up corporate donations is a poor way to measure "social responsibility." Just as the stately Carnegie-funded libraries and schools were little consolation for children whose parents and siblings died in one of his factories, how people make money is much more important than what they do with a tax-deductible sliver of it once it has hit their bank accounts or profit sheets.

So while I'd point to the Foxconn suicides before Apple's participation in the pretty-but-exploitative (RED) sham, Cortez is absolutely right when she says that Apple's "philanthropy tends to be narrow and episodic". And more importantly, Apple's facilitation of philanthropy is narrow and episodic.

There are several easy changes Apple could make that would facilitate grassroots funding of organizations and campaigns, but here's the one that could be the most transformative:

Allow non-profit donations inside individual apps to be made instantly via your iTunes account. Apple showed it was willing and able when it did so to benefit Haiti earthquake relief by way of the American Red Cross (they even waived the processing fee!). (And Ars Technica's Jake Shapiro reminds us that Android has no such restrictions.) Non-profit app developers should also be able to to assign a sliding scale price to their apps, so that single transaction can act in place of a traditional donation form. As an alternative to your iTunes account, and given the recent success of text-to-donate around recent disasters, it shouldn't be hard to offer donation options that simply get tacked onto your phone bill.

But as of right now, Apple doesn't even clear the much lower bar of allowing Apps to link to external donation forms - as a UK anti-bullying charity found out earlier this year.

If we're going to fund our social movements in ways that embody the democratic, grassroots-powered future we all would like to see, we'll need every tech tool at our disposal to achieve that. I'd take a minor, inexpensive policy change on Apple's part over the Steve Jobs Memorial Library any day.