Helping the Homeless

[_damaris]

We are a group of high school students that have organized a sale of hand-made blankets to raise funds for a homeless shelter. We plan to produce a variety of different blankets and sell them at different sporting and school events. We plan to mainly target your typical "soccer mom." The money raised will be donated to the Humilaty of Mary Housing in Davenport, Iowa. We were wondering if there were any ideas or helpful information you could give us to help our charity efforts

[Paul]

Congratulations on your charity work.

My only suggestion would be to set up a "temporary" website that you can refer people to where they can purchase a blanket. In situations like this someone may buy a blanket and bring it home and someone will see it and want one for themselves, or they may just want to help the cause. With a temporary site you can send purchasers home with a card or pamphlet with the site address.

I'm sure someone in your group can do that on one of the cheap templated sites like godaddy or wix. You aren't going to have overwhelming traffic.

There's quite a few tech savvy folks on here who can give better advice than me on that.

Good luck

[KristineS]

Think about setting up a Facebook page for the sale. Put pictures up and tell stories about how the donations will be used. Thank donors. Make sure you follow local people in your community and work on getting them to share your stories with their friends. Also make sure your Facebook page is mentioned on any promotional literature you do.

[Brandscribe]

Fantastic stuff, this is a great initiative. I would agree with Kristine, this is a job for social media. You should definitely look to set up a Facebook commerce page and take payments via a Facebook supported app. This one I've found is only $10 a month https://apps.facebook.com/shoptab/ . The beauty of having it all on Facebook is that you can target your market directly, word can spread organically amongst the people in your area and you can collect payment on the spot while people are looking at your page. You can then arrange distribution of the products around maybe a pickup time after school or similar?

Very best of luck!