Re: Charity E-Cards with £2 for the receiver to choose a charity for - Boost revenue and charity contributions

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Charity E-Cards with £2 for the receiver to choose a charity for - Boost revenue and charity contributions

daveboden 10-16-2006, 22:00
Real friends spend £3 on a real card from Clintons' and send it by post. Quite a waste of money, paper and fuel required to get the card from A to B but it kinda means something due to the cost and effort.

Cheap people send E-Cards. People receiving E-Cards feel that the sender hasn't gone to much effort.

There must be some middle ground (and a way for justgiving to boost revenue and get more money flowing to charities, otherwise I wouldn't mention it on this forum :o).

So, here's my idea. Allow a user to buy E-Cards in "packs" of 10 for £2 each on the justgiving website. So, that's a transaction of £20 + gift aid. You can use a e-card reseller like americangreetings.com so you don't have to provide your own content. This is what Yahoo already does (http://www.yahoo.americangreetings.com).

Then, and here's the fun bit. When the user sends a card, the recipient gets to choose which charity the £2 goes to. Now, how much better is that than a naff normal e-card and a Clintons' waste-of-money paper card? Oh, and much better than paper charity (Christmas) cards where 10p goes to charity!

I think that justgiving.com is in a unique position to offer this service. You have a great number of charities signed up so a recipient will easily be able to pick a worthy cause that interests them. I also think that paid charity e-cards is a huge gap in the market and I'd love to see justgiving.com exploit it so that charities can benefit instead of Clintons this Christmas :o)

Thanks for listening.
(by the way, I'm an experienced IT manager and Java developer, I work for an Investment Bank in Canary Wharf)

Re: Charity E-Cards with £2 for the receiver to choose a charity for - Boost revenue and charity contributions

simon@justgiving 10-18-2006, 10:29
That's a pretty cool idea Dave.

What's your favourite e-card site? I've yet to find one I really like so it would be good to see an example of a good usable site we could reference.

Re: Charity E-Cards with £2 for the receiver to choose a charity for - Boost revenue and charity contributions

will@justgiving 10-18-2006, 17:09
Hi Dave. Firstly thanks for sharing your thoughts with us. We love it when we find users who share our enthusiasm for things fundraising related.

We actually tried something similar for Christmas 2004. Our idea was similar to what your suggesting in that it allowed a person to buy a donation voucher for say £5 or £10 that would be delivered to their friend as an e-card. The recipient would then come to the site to redeem their voucher in the form of a donation to a charity of their choosing.

Whilst we saw some moderate success with this, we found the time and cost required to run this sort of product on an ongoing basis was actually diverting key resource (both people and investment) away from our hero product - the online fundraising page. With this in mind we decided it was not something we could afford to pursue at the time.

To a degree we are still in the same situation as we are still a relatively small team (just 30-odd people) and feel we still have a lot of innovating to do in the world of online sponsorship. Something which hopefully shines through in the JG site is that we very much want to provide the best experience in a few things, not a mediocre version of everything so at the moment we just couldn't give this sort of product the time it deserves.

Thanks again for your enthusiasm and ideas and believe us when we say this is not something we wouldn't like to do if we weren't so busy elsewhere.

Re: Charity E-Cards with £2 for the receiver to choose a charity for - Boost revenue and charity contributions

clare156uk 02-07-2007, 22:08
This is actually an idea I have thought of too. I agree with Dave in the original post. Last Christmas I was looking for a charity that I could donate money to for online xmas cards. I would prefer my donated cash to go to the charity direct rather than being lost in card processing fees where by the charity in fact only receives a small donation. After racking my brains of all the different 'major' charities that I could think of on the internet, I finally stumbled a small scale charity that offered this facility. I couldn't believe in this day and age that this hadn't yet been majorly exploited.

Personally I think the times are moving on in many way with more and more people using the internet for many purposes - I mean look at the spending on the internet during Christmas this year - didn't the high street suffer because of it (not that I am trying to drive trade away from the high street in any shape or form). But myself personally I do my Christmas shopping on the internet, my banking on the internet, even down to the lottery, it’s quick and easy and done from a click of a mouse!

Also, many people’s attitudes are changing too, I personally would think that receiving an e-card with cash donated to charity is a rather novel idea and would catch on, you have already revolutionised donating to charity!

Whilst this would be predominately a seasonal catchment I really feel that there would be an uptake - perhaps the range of e-cards could be anything from a custom design, perhaps the facility to upload a photo's of the kids for a mothers day card, or a designer card designed by whoever, or celebrity endorsed cards to the usual traditional cards for all different occasions, Valentines, Easter (as people become more health orientated perhaps they'll be inclined to donate cash to charity rather than spend it on loads of chocolate, as we all know we spend way too much and eat too much anyway), just think of all the occasions that people send cards for.

Just think how many people in the UK have an email address? How many people worldwide?

And as for 'free' e-card sites - the ones that are covered in cheap advertisement and have pop-ups all over the place - I can't stand them, they are very unprofessional and certainly drive me away from using them.

On a last note I don’t send Christmas Cards to people at work as we have nominated company charity, it has been common practice by many people in the business to send an email round wishing everyone the jollies stating that we are donating to the company charity.

With the site structure that you have successfully set up it seems that you are in an ideal situation to potentially start another revolution!!

Well thats my view and I thinks it's only a matter of time before this is exploited!

Thanks

Clare

Re: Charity E-Cards with £2 for the receiver to choose a charity for - Boost revenue and charity contributions

daveboden 02-13-2007, 22:10
Thanks for your comments, a week before the the eve of the other seasonal event that sees people rushing to Clintons.

I spent my £3 valentines card tax today, along with everyone else queuing up in Canary Wharf's PaperChase (so much more upmarket than Clinton's, dontchaknow :o) )

My fiance, Katie, spends £10 a month in Clintons. Birthday in the office = Birthday Card. Seriously! :)

Re: Charity E-Cards with £2 for the receiver to choose a charity for - Boost revenue and charity contributions

Sarah :-) 07-31-2007, 23:19
Justa quick note on the paper chary xmas cards where the charity only receives about 10p - very true if bought from the high street. But if you go directly to the charity at christmas time most will be selling xmas cards where they receive all of the profits because they have ordred them and cu out the middle men. (Normally evil supermarkets!) Want a suggestion for really nice cards - the Haemophilia Society. (I should know - I helped choose them!)

Sponser me on:
http://www.justgiving.com/sarahschocolatechallenge

Find out more about haemophilia on: http://www.haemophilia.org.uk/

Read my blog on: http://sarahschocolatechallenge.blogspot.com/

Happy fundraising! xXx

Re: Charity E-Cards with £2 for the receiver to choose a charity for - Boost revenue and charity contributions

daveboden 08-01-2007, 9:04
Hi Sarah,

That's a good point, but even so I'd be interested to know how much of the purchase price goes to the charity. I'll be kind and suggest that we don't factor the 30p of postage into the equation that could have been given to charity rather than the Royal Mail. If it's 75% then I'm impressed and I'll buy some straight away. If it's 50% or less, then I think there's still serious mileage in the idea of charity e-cards simply because there are no significant production or distribution costs. Not to mention the environmental benefits of e-cards... (which I don't seriously think is a big issue :o)

Do you have the % figures for the cards that you mentioned?

Cheers,
Dave

Re: Charity E-Cards with £2 for the receiver to choose a charity for - Boost revenue and charity contributions

Sarah :-) 08-02-2007, 11:50
Well its basically 100% minus the cost of buying the cards. The Haemophilia Society buys them directly from a company that specialises in providing christmas cards to charities. (As do most charities that provide their own cards). I'm afraid I can't give you the exact figures but as I say because we cut out the middle men we generally receive about 60% of the selling price. But its for a weeks worth of work, no risk involved and it also raises awarness. SO actually a really easy way for us to raise money. - And at a guess it'd prob be about the same for all charities that offer their own cards.
I agree though charity e-cards would be a pretty good idea.

Re: Charity E-Cards with £2 for the receiver to choose a charity for - Boost revenue and charity contributions

andrew@cbmuk 04-17-2008, 10:16
CBM has also often looked at using e-cards for Christmas, Easter etc... but it seems that we're not the only ones struggling to find a suitable provider.

We'd be looking at generating our own cards (we have a large image archive to plunder) and generating revenue through this means would really help.

Paper cards, aside from being an environmental nightmare, are expensive to produce and expensive and time consuming from an admin point of view.

clare156uk wrote:
And as for 'free' e-card sites - the ones that are covered in cheap advertisement and have pop-ups all over the place - I can't stand them, they are very unprofessional and certainly drive me away from using them.

Absolutely - there are so many sites out there but I really wouldn't want CBM's christmas cards to share screen space with another company's advert - unsuitable products or products that are unethically produced would really contradict CBM's cause.

Andrew
www.cbmuk.org.uk
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