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Using eBay Auctions for Fundraising

Posted by Cheap Airfares in Interesting Stuff on 03-06-2009

Everyone is getting on the bandwagon. Large companies successfully use eBay auctions to offload excess inventory, the Postal Service rids itself of unclaimed merchandise, police departments sell confiscated goods. Thousands of nonprofits are doing business with eBay.

Are eBay auctions the fundraiser’s cash cow or are the dangling cash-carrots never quite reachable?

There you have both ends of the online auction spectrum. Likely, your organisation’s ability to generate donations in this fashion lies somewhere in between, hopefully toward the high end. Merely registering an account with eBay doesn’t guarantee that sellers will be prompted to donate part of an item’s selling price to your group. Or that buyers will gobble up your items. Philanthropically minded people are only beginning to see online auctions as a serious avenue of charitable donations.

Successfully trading on eBay is far more than a mechanical process. You’ll need staff and/or volunteer commitment, and sales and marketing know-how. It takes little skill to get on the bandwagon; it takes a lot not to fall off.

There are several main reasons to use eBay as part of your overall fundraising plan. Not because its the cool thing to do. Not because it takes the place of person-to-person campaigning.
But because:
* EBay enables your group to reach a huge, new market of non-constituents, uncultivated strangers who will immediately participate in funding your projects by buying your items.

*You can fit a few hundred people in an in-house auction room, but you can reach millions online.

*You’ll capture new prospects. A percentage of buyers will turn out to be donors to future campaigns if your follow-through is sound. Otherwise, why not simply run an online membership auction from your organisation’s web site?

* It’s cost effective. No space to rent, tickets to sell, caterers to hire, and so on.

* Its novelty will captivate volunteers who are used to performing the same campaign tasks year after year.

How you can capture a profitable share of this new market depends on the sales direction you take, the items you offer, how they’re presented, and your game plan.

Direct and Community Selling
You’ll obviously receive the most income and acquire the most new prospects if your group uses donated items to auction. For nonprofits, eBay terms this “Direct Selling.” It’s the same technique used by organisations that produce in-house, live auctions by soliciting in-kind gifts.

“Community Selling” is a term eBay uses to describe the process whereby sellers designate all or part of the selling price to an organisation. This offers your present donors new opportunities to support your drive.

For example, the Brown’s annual gift is $125. Your latest newsletter describes and promotes the benefits to the campaign from members selling unwanted items on eBay. The Browns’ decide that two 17″ hand painted platters are items they haven’t used for years. They list them on eBay at $19.95 each and designate your group to receive 80% of the selling price.

The remaining 20%, they figure, will take care of shipping. The platters each sell for $25. You have an additional donation from the Browns of $40. If 99 other present donors did the same you’d have an additional $4,000 on top of their cash gifts. And what about the members who couldn’t afford to give you cash donations? Surely, many of them would find an item or two to sell on eBay on your behalf. So, you see, the potential for raising funds through eBay is real, but eBay is only the vehicle, not the driving force. Selling the concept is the organisation’s job.

What Items to Offer?
While it’s been shown that many non-constituent eBay buyers react favorably to knowing that proceeds of a sale are helping fund a nonprofit organisation, their interest is driven by an item’s appeal, not necessarily an organisation’s mission.

People will buy anything, especially when they think they’re getting a deal. Last time I looked, a set of 10 real shark teeth was about to be auctioned for $7.99. But since you’re in the serious business of raising money, not running online garage sales, offering genuine collectable teeth will do little to help fund your annual budget. Stay away from trinkets when soliciting direct selling items if possible. However, memorabilia is a natural for online auctions.

The more your items play to a universal audience the more they’ll be seen, and the higher the selling price. For example, a vintage Cowboy type belt buckle from a city in Arizona could sell to a local organisation member or be even more valuable to an Australian outback buyer.

Most everything sells on eBay, but collectibles have always been big sellers, also electronics in all categories, music, books and games. Everyone has a few old books and CDs lying around that you can convert to cash by selling them on ebay. And certainly one-time, high profile items with special appeal, like seats in a corporate box at a big game. Or a trip to the Barrier Reef.

If your group, school or club is looking for school fundraising ideas and easy fundraiser ideas, have a look at Goldstar Gifts and Stationary’s easy to manage ideas for fundraising.

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Time Management and Goal Setting

Posted by Cheap Airfares in Interesting Stuff on 20-03-2009

Tags: bookkeeping accounting mackay townsville cairns MYOB

mackay-bookkeeping Time management is an area of business management often overlooked or ignored. We all know someone in small business who races around like a madman all day, never enough hours in a day, all they do is rush and get worked up - maybe this person is you!

At the end of the day, when the dust settles, what have you achieved? Do you review the day and wonder “what happened to the day, I didn’t get as much done as I thought I would”. If this sounds familiar, then you may have an organisational and time management problem.

Successful people never seem to rush, they remain composed and unflustered. The difference between them and everybody else is they have mastered time management.

What is time management? It is simply allocating time in your day in an organised and efficient way. Before we can really understand how to time manage our day, we must ask ourselves what are we trying to achieve today, this week, this year and possibly ten years from now. This is “Goal setting”.

The best way in my opinion to achieve goals is to write them down. You should review these goals from time to time to ensure that they are relevant and achievable but not so achievable that you don’t have to try hard to achieve them otherwise what is the purpose of the goals in the first place?

At the start of each working year you should sit down and think about what you want to achieve this year, it could be that you want to increase your profits by 20%, you may want to move into larger premises, you may want to reduce your debt substantially. At the start of each working week you should write down on a note pad or in your diary the major jobs that need to be done this week, and review them each day to ensure you’re making progress and hopefully mark some of the tasks off the list.

You should keep the list on your desk or in a place where you will be constantly reminded what needs to be done this week. This list should be in order of priority so that the most important tasks at the top of the list get done first. Anything not achieved this week will be carried forward next week on a higher priority, this will ensure it gets done.

The next thing you should be doing is having a daily list of jobs to do. This will help keep you on track each day. Again, this list should be displayed where you can constantly refer to it and mark off the jobs completed. Marking off the jobs will give you a sense of achievement and let you know how you are progressing through the day. Always stick to the list where possible and keep working from high priority to low priority.

I know things can come up through the day that can throw the whole day out, but you must either deal with the crisis and return to your list or if the new task isn’t as important as some of the jobs on the list put it at the bottom of the list and continue doing what you were doing.

Every task you have to do should be written down for a couple of reasons. Firstly, so you don’t forget to do it and secondly, so you keep your day organised and you achieve your daily goals.

Beware starting jobs and not finishing them. This will turn tomorrow into a mess of half finished jobs and will cause “list blowout”. You will end up with a list a mile long and you will give up in despair and revert back to old habits of being in confusion all day and achieving nothing.

Remember each day you achieve your goals and tick off everything on your list, you get a little closer to achieving your weekly and ultimately your yearly and long term goals.
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For Mackay Bookkeeping, Townsville Bookkeeping and Cairns Bookkeeping, contact Dollarwise Bookkeeping. Dollarwise have a remote MYOB bookkeeping service for all types and sizes of business.

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May Favourite Social Bookmarking Sites

Posted by Cheap Airfares in Interesting Stuff, SEO Tools on 27-02-2009

Social bookmarking is all the range in 2009. It’s a proven method of drawing traffic to your web site and for gaining those valuable links that we all covet. Basically all you do is share your favourite web site links with others then other people vote your links up or down depending on how interesting or useful they are.

Most of the sites below use the very popular Scuttle or Scuttle Plus software. If you have any to add, please leave a comment.

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Nine words women use

Posted by Digital Brands in Interesting Stuff on 22-07-2007

1.) Fine: This is the word women use to end an argument when they are right and you need to shut up.

2.) Five Minutes: If she is getting dressed, this means a half an hour. Five minutes is only five minutes if you have just been given five more minutes to do what you’re doing before helping around the house.

3.) Nothing: This is the calm before the storm. This means something, and you should be on your toes. Arguments that begin with nothing usually end in “fine”.

4.) Go ahead: This is a dare, not permission. Don’t Do It! The best way to defuse this situtation is to say: “On second thought’s you’re right. I don’t know what I was thinking.”

5.) Loud sigh: This is actually a word, but it is often misunderstood by men. A loud sigh means she thinks you are an idiot and wonders why she is wasting her time standing here and arguing with you about nothing. (Refer back to #3 for the meaning of “nothing”.)

6.) That’s Okay: This is one of the most dangerous statements a women can make to a man. That’s okay means she wants to think long and hard before deciding how and when you will pay for your mistake.

7.) Thanks: A woman is thanking you, do not question, or faint. Just say “you’re welcome”.

8.) Whatever: Is a women’s way of saying “you’re dead”.

9.) Don’t worry about it, I’ve got it: Another dangerous statement, meaning this is something that a woman has told a man to do several times, but is now doing it herself. This will later result in a man asking `What’s wrong?’ For the women’s response refer to #3.

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Engin review - VOIP service

Posted by Digital Brands in Interesting Stuff on 19-07-2007

My wife makes an average of 60 calls per month to Sydney from Brisbane at an average costs of $2.70 each. That’s $162 per month. She also has clients overseas in places like PNG and the middle east.

I’ve been thinking about signing up for one of those voice over the Internet services for years and finally last week I signed up with Engin. The signup process was easy and within 3 days I had my Engin voice box and a nifty little wireless phone. The plan I’ve signed up to is $10 per month and the phone cost $30 if I committed to 12 months.

So far I have been very impressed with the quality of service. We have Optus Cable Internet and a small wireless LAN at home. All I had to do to get it working was plug in the Engin box to the router, activate the service by e-mail and then power up the telephone.

The voice quality is very acceptable, about 90% as good as standard PSTN. The other impressive features are incoming call control, call blocking, time of day diversion and so on. A 4 hour call to Sydney costs us 10 cents. Overseas calls are about 3.5 cents per minute.

I have no idea how much bandwidth a call consumes, which can be important if you have a cap on your downloads and uploads. I suspect bandwidth consumption is around about 20 kilobits per second which equates to 150k per minute or 9 Mb per hour. It could be a lot less than that because I assume the gaps between words consume very little bandwidth.

I was a bit worried about what happens to the voice quality when shaping from the ISP kicks in. Once I hit my download limit on the cable Internet, Optus throttles me back to about 56Kbps. I noticed no change in the voice quality once my connection was throttled back to 56Kbps.

UPDATE - PROBLEMS WITH DROP OUTS

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Health Warning: How I ripped my scrotum open

Posted by Digital Brands in Interesting Stuff on 23-06-2007

Skin tag photo from Internet I had a nasty experience this week that lead to me ending up at the emergency ward of the local hospital. It is an embarrassing story, but an interesting story none the less.

I usually ride a bicycle to work and this particular day I had worn nylon swimming shorts instead of my normal bike shorts. These swimming shorts are the type that are lined with a white, mesh-type fabric.

To cut a long story short, I had a skin tag on the bottom of my scrotum about the size of a match head. It had been there for years and didn’t cause any discomfort so I had done nothing about it.

Unfortunately, during my ride home this skin tag had worked its way into a hole in the mesh lining of my swim shorts.

I was about to have a shower and pulled my shorts down. The next thing I know there’s blood all over the bathroom floor and a sharp pain in my crotch.

You guessed it, when I pulled my shorts down I ripped off the skin tag and about 2 cm of skin from my scrotum with it.

I had no idea that scrotums could bleed so much. In a calm, but shaky voice, I called my wife to come and help me.

Fighting back nausea from the sight of so much blood, she did a great job of patching me up using folded tissue and band aids.

I then waddled down the street to the local private hospital’s emergency department.

I told the triage nurse about my wound and asked for some stitches.

She asked me how it happened and in return I smiled a sick grin and asked her “do you really want to know?”

She paused for a few seconds and shaking her head said that she didn’t really want to. Trying to fight back giggles, she got me in to see the doctor.

He was very casual and professional about the whole story and suggested we try a special medical superglue. Holding the edges of the wound together he applied a bead of glue to the wound and held it together for about 30 seconds. The glue stung like hell, the gluing was even more painful than the initial injury.

He told me to wear jockey shorts for the rest of the week and that the glue would eventually drop off in a few days.

He was right. There was no swelling, no inflammation, and no pain. After three days I was back on the bike as good as new.

It cost me $250 for the treatment and I was in and out in 50 minutes. Medicare will pay all but $150 of it. I could have gone to the local public hospital but I didn’t feel like waiting for 7 hours just to have some overworked intern stitch me up in a very delicate place.

I’ll be wearing proper bike shorts from now on.

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I’ve always loved demotivational posters

Posted by Digital Brands in Interesting Stuff on 05-06-2007

You’ve probably seen those trite posters featuring rowers, runners, concert musicians and so on working together as a team to achieve lofty goals. It’s all bullshit. Over the last 10 years a few enterprising individuals have cut through the crap and released a set of demotivational posters that tell it how it is. Here is a link to a collection and below is the latest crop: