A Gift Has Been Made in Your Honor….
Friday, November 28th, 2008Scene: Wednesday afternoon, 4:00 p.m., two days ago. The Wednesday night before Thanksgiving. I was just about to shut down for the day. Then I talked to a local editor. “Can you help?” she asked.
Her paper is going to run an article on clever gift ideas for the holidays. She would like to include some charities on the list, where people can give a gift in someone’s honor and the honoree gets a card telling of their gift. “Sure,” I said, “They’re called Tribute Cards. A gift can be made in someone’s honor or in memory of someone. How many charities do you want?”
“Five or six” was the response, “and can you do it by Monday morning at the latest?”
Oooh, by Monday. Wince. The only things between me and Monday morning are Thanksgiving, Black Friday and the weekend. Tough to catch a development director in the office; either they’re with their families or they are organizing volunteers to serve turkey dinners to the poor (which I did for 14 years). So, no using my magical superpowers as a fundraiser and calling six development directors and saying, “Hey, can you come up with tribute cards if the newspaper says you’ll do them?” I’d have to do what mere mortals do and research it all online.
You know what I found? A lot of local charities don’t have a space on their website announcing that they’ll send out cards in honor of or in memory of someone. Several didn’t have a donation page at all, or didn’t allow for online donations. A few didn’t have web pages of their own — they used ones from United Way. There were a couple of charities I couldn’t find at all, including one that held a major fundraising event just a few weeks ago.
I understand not having any indication that you’ll do cards in honor of someone; you just didn’t think of it. I do NOT understand failing to have a donation page or, worse yet, a website. People, please! It’s the millenium! Get with the program. You don’t have to create your own webpage, but you do have to pay a web designer to do it for you. If you don’t have a webpage by now, you’re losing out on donors, volunteers, and even clients of your services. After all, the poorest homeless person can still sign on to the internet at the local library and find you and get help from you. Get with it! I’m no technology leader, and I’ve been using the internet for more than 13 years. Not having a way for donors to give online, or even find you, is not acceptable anymore.
Did I find six charities? Sure. Ok, I cheated just a tad. I was actually at United Blood Services that morning, giving blood in advance of Thanksgiving (blood needed, many donors on vacation), and I saw that they had a card for everyone who came in — something to give that one special person, saying, “A Gift of Life has been made in your honor…” So I only needed five more charities, not six.
Will it make the paper? I’ll be sure to post it as a link on this blog and let you know. It will be nice to publicly applaud those charities who are together enough to be found by mere mortals who want to donate money instead of buying presents.
Best wishes for a safe holiday season. If you have questions, please write me, Katherine Wertheim, at katherine@werth-it.com. Or post a question on my comments section at www.werth-it.com/blog.