150 charities sign up to online charity Christmas card service
Howard Lake | 22 August 2007 | News
By the time that new online charity Christmas card venture Studio51 launched its website this month, over 150 charities had signed up to use its service, which donates 51% of the sale price to charities.
The service has attracted both national charities like Marie Curie Cancer Care, Macmillan Cancer Support, and the Civil Service Benevolent Fund, and local charities such as Kent Scout Council and West Suffolk Mind.
In addition to these charities, users can also search Studio51’s database for any one of 4,500 registered charities (from information supplied by online charity database GuideStar UK) or nominate their own charity to receive funds.
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Jax Devonshire, development manager at West Suffolk Mind, believes Studio51 will open up a new opportunity to fundraise online for smaller charities such as hers. “I like the idea of Christmas cards for our supporters,” she said, “but I don’t like the idea of having to buy the cards up front, store them, sell them ourselves, and incur the costs for all of this. We are a charity, not a shop front.
“This way we can still provide cards for our donors but we are not tied into up-front stock and neither are we left with cards that we can’t sell, which look more and more tired as years go buy.”
She was optimistic that online Christmas cards could expand local charities’ reach to potential supporters nationwide.
Charities signing up to the Studio51 scheme are provided with their own landing page on the Studio51 website. Charities are then responsible for directing their own donors to the site.
West Suffolk Mind, for example, is putting information about Studio51 on its own website, on the home page and the affinity partners links page, as well as running an article in the printed donor newsletter.
Studio51’s founder Alan Hawkes, a former vice-president of the Greetings Card Association, was very pleased with the response to his new venture at its launch at the Institute of Fundraising’s National Convention.
“We’ve already got 157 sign-ups and applications are coming in at the rate of 10 a day. Now that our website is live, we’re expecting the number of partner charities to really take off.”
The company pays 51% of the sale price into a protected trust account, so the money is not held by Studio51. The trust account pays accrued income to the charity every three months.
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.