Help me find a Haiti relief agency with peer online fundraising

by | Jan 16, 2010 | Social Signal

Like many people, when I heard about the disaster in Haiti, I wanted to help. And I wanted to give others a way to help, too.

Here’s what I decided to do: go to a relief agency’s web site, and set up a peer fundraising page (along the lines of what Convio, Blackbaud and DemocracyInAction create for their clients).

These are pages where you can collect donations on  behalf of the charity; they handle the credit card transaction and tax receipts. Health charities in particular have become adept at creating those pages – think Run for the Cure or our friends at BC Children’s Hospital Foundation – and the breakout success story for peer networked fundraising was the Howard Dean presidential campaign.

My thinking was, for every donation over a certain amount – say, $50 or $100 – I’d send the donor a signed print of their favourite Noise to Signal cartoon. While I can’t handle credit card transactions or charitable receipts, I can handle printing, signing and mailing prints.

I’m all ready to go at this end. But I can’t find a Canadian relief agency that would let me do this.

Pretty much everyone takes donations online, but whether I’m missing something or it’s just not there, the fact is I couldn’t find one enabled for networked fundraising.

So I’m turning to Social Signal’s readers and the nptech community: can you help me find the right agency? Here’s what I’m looking for:

  • Ideally, I’d like to work with a Canadian charity. But if I can’t find a Canadian partner, I’m happy to support another agency. (Ammado looks like a possibility.)
  • I need to be able to track who has given how much (or at least who has given more than the threshold amount).
  • I need to collect their contact information – at the very least, an email address – so I can send them their print.

Suggestions?

Warm hearts vs. cold feet

by | Dec 7, 2009 | Vancouver

If you’ve ever accidentally soaked your shoes in a puddle on a freezing day, you’ll appreciate how miserable the experience can be… and how desperate you can be to get to your home, school or workplace to change into a spare pair. When you’re...

ChangeEverything.ca launches "Got socks?" drive

by | Dec 7, 2009 | Social Signal, Vancouver

If you’ve ever accidentally soaked your shoes in a puddle on a freezing day, you’ll appreciate how miserable the experience can be… and how desperate you can be to get to your home, school or workplace to change into a spare pair.

When you’re living on the streets, though, it’s more than just discomfort. Cold, wet feet can quickly become agonizing to walk on – adding a big barrier to finding a job, food or shelter for the night.

And I’m going to let Kate Dugas from ChangeEverything.ca take it from here:

A few months after its launch, ChangeEverything and the people that make up the community here, made a difference in the lives of some people living on the streets of Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside with successful drive for warm clothing during a particularly bitter cold snap. Since 2006 we have used ChangeEverything.ca to collect thousands and thousands of items of warmth for folks living in the DTES of Vancouver.

Cold wet feet are a huge reason people living on the street get sick and even die in the winter. Getting clean dry socks to local shelters is a great way to help alleviate this problem. So this year we are focusing on socks!

So start looking through your closets and drawers. We’ll take mis-matched socks that are clean and in good condition. But even better, we’ll take ones that you went out and bought especially for this purpose. Reply with a comment on this post if you have leads on enormous quantities of socks, or if you just have a few pairs or even one pair to give. Each pair will totally make a difference. It’s true. Believe it.

I am also working on having a Vancity “Got Socks” account opened. Watch this space.

Kate

PS -oh and please spread the word. tweet this. add it to your facebook. emai your friends about it, heck post it to your fridge! see if your kids want to take up a collection at school for socks. whatever you can think of, the wackier the better.

Just leave a comment on her blog post to tell Kate you have socks to donate. And click here to pass the word along on Twitter!

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