The cookie crumbles
Howard Lake | 11 March 1998 | News
Cookies are generating problems for online fundraising by Girl Guides and Brownies in the USA. These cookies aren’t the Web-based variety which help Web site owners track the movements of visitors, but the original sweet biscuit variety. The sales of boxes of cookies is a traditional means of fundraising for the organisations. A third of the 319 councils of Guides and Brownies are now trying to sell their cookies via the Web. This has removed the community aspect of this form of community fundraising since Guides can now sell cookies anywhere in the country, thereby eating into the profits of other groups. As a result some groups have banned online cookie sales from out-of-state purchasers.
Will such voluntary restrictions work for long? Or will the more entrepreneurial nonprofit groups generate a whole new source of income, at the expense of the more traditional groups? This issue is bound to be reflected in the UK before long, as one charity realises that its traditional fundraising market has been eroded by another organisation using the Web.
About Howard Lake
Howard Lake is consultant editor of UK Fundraising. He founded the site in 1994 and successfully sold it in 2022. As director of Giving X Ltd he is exploring growing giving on a massive scale.
He is the founder of Fundraising Camp and co-founder of GoodJobs.