Children In Need

[TraceyHand]

hmmm...I'm a bit limited with what I can donate but, as products go, I can donate £150 worth (retail) of Organised Mum home planners/calendars, if it helps

[Jan]

If we run the site, how are we going to make money for the charity? Sorry for being thick here.

Regards,

[leehack]

Gareth that might be the way forward, but i don't see us being able to do both. If a website build is taken on, that will be such a tight timescale and the organising of data will take 3-4 hours alone, leaving 20 hours to build a site from scratch of which most of the team will have to sleep at some stage.

Lets get names, numbers, monies, donations, site owner needed amendments etc. compiled all into one big list and see which of the options we should do, the decision will probably be made for us by what we get back.

[leehack]

If we run the site, how are we going to make money for the charity? Sorry for being thick here.

Regards,

By selling the donated products.

[Cheapprices4u]

Gareth that might be the way forward, but i don't see us being able to do both. If a website build is taken on, that will be such a tight timescale and the organising of data will take 3-4 hours alone, leaving 20 hours to build a site from scratch of which most of the team will have to sleep at some stage.

Lets get names, numbers, monies, donations, site owner needed amendments etc. compiled all into one big list and see which of the options we should do, the decision will probably be made for us by what we get back.

what i meant by that suggestion was

in the mean time why not do a few "odd jobs" to raise more money while the bigger project takes shape?
no one said it HAD to be done all on the day , thats just the bigger challenge

no point holding out just in case

[kathynewman]

If we go the route of running a site selling donated products we wouldn't really need to worry about software would we - I for one (and am sure others) have developer copy of software and wouldn't need to worry about Order Manager if we ran it ourselves.

Hosting - I have some spare space we can use to host the site.

Kathy

[Jan]

By selling the donated products.

you could probably make the same amount of money or more by selling them on ebay - not so exciting though.

Regards,

[leehack]

Gareth & Kathy you both make excellent points. We must get details in on what people want or will donate though, plus we then need a team of designers to do the work. Without the team, it fails miserably. I know of one designer who will offer his services for 24 hours if needed, that is the only definite we have. We need confirmations, this needs to be a done deal by mid next week IMO.

Personally i am liking the idea of our own shop selling donated products/services and each donator has their own section on the site with their donated products included plus a link back to their main store.

So Bumpsy has calendars in her section of the site and also a link back to her site. It could be an annual thing and products could be drop shipped, when making a donation, allow for shipping in on that too etc.

[leehack]

you could probably make the same amount of money or more by selling them on ebay - not so exciting though.

Regards,

You might be right, but this would be something to bring us all together and nothing to say it couldn't be an annual thing. Maybe we should just focus on how we can make the most money and forget exciting or interesting though?

[kathynewman]

Ok - here's my suggestion:

Build a unique website which is designed and put online in 24hrs selling goods donated by forum members and/or others.

One person controls downloading of orders (happy to volunteer for this if go this route). The orders are then emailed/faxed to the donator who then sends out the goods they have donated to customer.

Once all the goods have been sold (or after specified time period) we can either take the website down and put back up again next year or we could sell off the design to someone. We could even have a product that is buy this site once we've done with it.

Couple of logistical things that would need to think about.

P&P - how this is dealt with - would suggest that we don't have p&p chaged on the site - if necessary cost of shipping the goods could be added to the sale price as long as we stated on the site that if someone was paying £25 for an item that say £20 was going to CiN and £5 was to cover cost of shipping item.

Taking payment for goods - need to work out how to do this and how would we fund credit card/paypal fees.

What does everyone think?

Kathy

[Jan]

Maybe we should just focus on how we can make the most money and forget exciting or interesting though?

If you make it a site for donated products, then it opens it up to a lot more people, I'm sure that if I contacted my customers quite a few would be happy to donate - the key is to make is really easy for people to help.

If we were doing that, I'd rather sell my software/paper donation than have it used on the site - it woudln't really be that much use for a site with a short shelf life - or maybe do both, dunno.

My other suggestion would be to build the site on the 15th (we get our commentator back then as well) and put the products for sale at midnight, then we could watch the items selling on the 16th.

If this is the setup then I'd be happy to put the site live on my dedicated server and I could then use my software to autoforward the sales to the appropriate people as they arrive, I have a multisite license so there would then be no issues with licensing then and no software or hosting costs.
Cheers,

[kathynewman]

I'm happy to:

a) Donate goods from Puddle Pet Care & Naturally to You
b) Admin - keeping list of products that have been donated
c) Design - if there's anything can do on this front happy to help.
d) Administer the orders once site up and running

Kathy

[kathynewman]

Jan - sounds like great idea - especially the order forwarding bit - save me a job I just volunteered for!!

Kathy

[kathynewman]

One more thing just thought about is we're going to need a domain name. Now having had and heard of problems previously with domain names being suggested and then when go to buy they have gone - think we might need to do with off the forum - so maybe a core group of people would have to decide on this via email.

Kathy

[Cheapprices4u]

so a sort of shop within a shop, all donators get there section and a link
orders are sent onto the person who needs to send out

but there in lies a problem how do we drive people to the mixed bag of a site?
or am i missing something here?
is Seo really that instant?
are we buying off each other?
url?

i have a dozen or so
some sat doing nothing