Last fall I had the opportunity to teach at the CAN (California Association of Nonprofits) Conference in Los Angeles. The attendees were all interested in new ways of fund raising for their organizations. In fact, in a survey of those who attended fund raising is the topic most on their minds.
If you are an Education Specialist, consider speaking with the non profit organizations in your local area. They receive donatoned items (some good, some not so good) which they have to dispose of in some way. As you can imagine, eBay can really help.
Since nonprofits are trying hard to keep as much of the donation as possible, they cannot often afford to hire eBay Trading Assistants to sell the items they've received. Some TA's charge upwards of 30%, so it would be much better for the nonprofit to have an in-house person handle the eBay auctions. If you can teach them how to handle the items, and steer clear of auction-management companies that would take a large chunk of their proceeds, you are genuinely helping these organizations.
eBay's Giving Works program has been a tremendous force for good in allowing nonprofits to move donated items, as well as allowing generous members of the eBay community to donate to the charity of their choice. eBay has chosen MissionFish as their partner in handling charity auctions. If you're going to teach locally about this, you'll want to make yourself very familiar with the process for:
- Registering with eBay
- Registering with MissionFish
- Fees for charity auctions and how eBay handles them.
These organizations are not always able to pay as much as for-profit businesses. You may have to create a special rate for them and even work out some form of trade. Many of their sites get pretty good traffic and you may ask if they'll include a link to your site on their website. You may also be able to teach a class for your regular rate, invoice them, and then "donate" the class as a tax deduction. (Check with your tax person before doing this though - I'm no tax expert, and laws vary from state to state of course.)
In any case, you'll enjoy working with these interesting organizations that are in place to help others.
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