New online charity card retailer will open up internet fundraising for small and local charities

Howard Lake | 28 August 2007 | Newswire

A new online charity Christmas card venture that will pass 51 per cent of the sale price to charities – compared to a typical 10 per cent, or less, from cards sold through high street retailers – aims to open up a whole new vista of internet fundraising to smaller charities.
Less than a month after launching to the charity sector, more than 150 charities have already signed up to Studio51 (www.studio51.com). Alongside household name organisations such as Marie Curie Cancer Care, Macmillan Cancer Support, and the Civil Service Benevolent Fund, are local charities such as Kent Scout Council and West Suffolk Mind. As well as the 200 charities that have already opened Studio51 accounts, users can also search Studio51’s database for any one of 4,500 registered charities or nominate their own charity to receive funds.
Studio51’s founder – Alan Hawkes, a former vice president of the Greetings Card Association – hopes his new operation will help double the £15 million given annually to charities through Christmas cards within five years.
Studio51 enables charities’ supporters to buy online. Cards are then personalised with the charity’s message (see attached Fact Sheet), making Studio51 ideal for those charities that do not – and until now could not – run their own retailing operations.
Fifty-one per cent of the sale price is paid into a protected trust account, so this money is not held by Studio51. The trust account pays accrued income to the charity every three months.
Jax Devonshire, development manager at West Suffolk Mind, says Studio51 is ideal” for smaller and local charities.
I like the idea of Christmas cards for our supporters 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.
Fifty-one per cent is an excellent deal. It is also very psychologically important for charities to see that they are getting more than half of the transaction; that they are getting the bigger part of the deal.”
Charities signing up to the Studio51 scheme are provided with their own landing page on the Studio51 website, which went live at the beginning of August. Charities are then responsible for directing their own donors to the site. West Suffolk Mind 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.
Many of the donors to locally- or regionally-based charities live locally, but having such a cost-effective form of internet fundraising lets us expand our reach to people from all over the county,” Devonshire says.
People going to Studio51’s site can see that we are there along with a lot of other charities, and although they may live in Scotland or Cornwall, if they’ve had a connection with us in the past, there is now a way for them to give to us at Christmas.”
Alan Hawkes – who ran greetings card company Paper Rose until it was sold earlier this year – wants Studio51 to act as a focal point for raising the profile of charity greetings cards so that everyone producing charity cards commercially gives a bigger percentage of the sale price to charities. The Institute of Fundraising – the umbrella body for fundraisers in the UK – has already agreed to meet Hawkes to discuss how they can jointly bring the issue Christmas card donations to the fore.
I have been in the greetings card industry for 25 years and for 25 years I have been saddened at how little an amount retailers and publishers pass on to charities, which is often as little 10p on a box of cards costing more than £3 and rarely rises above 10 per cent of the pack price,” says Hawkes.
They’re just not giving enough. Charities get around £10-15m a year and that is just plain disappointing when more than £100m a year is currently spent on charity Christmas cards in the UK.
The amount charities get should be – and could be – around £20m-£30m. Of course, not all those extra donations will come through sales of Studio51 cards, though I think we can make a major contribution to it. Charities should be looking to double this current figure by Christmas 2012,” Hawkes says.
The internet has now made it possible to re-write the rules and direct the funds directly to the charity.”
Hawkes concludes: We think that charities should be the biggest beneficiaries from the sale of charity Christmas cards, not the retailers. That’s why , with the help of the internet, we have designed and built Studio51 around the ground-breaking concept that 51 per cent of our sales will go to charity.”
The Studio51 website – www.studio51.com – went live on August 2, 2007.
ENDS
For further details or to arrange an interview with Alan Hawkes or Jax Devonshire, contact: Ian MacQuillin at TurnerPR +44 020 8768 5199, 07977 422273 or ia*@tu******.uk
Notes for editors
Studio51
Studio51 works in partnership with charities, by encouraging their supporters to buy Christmas Cards from Studio 51. The cards are supplied with self-adhesive labels displaying the charity’s message and 51 per cent of the sale price of every card is placed into a protected trust account that pays out to the charity every three months.
Studio51 is ideally suited to small and large Charities alike and is incremental and complementary to existing Christmas card arrangements.
Studio51 has applied for corporate membership of the Institute of Fundraising and membership of the Fundraising Standards Board.
Alan Hawkes
Alan Hawkes started greetings card company Paper Rose in 1984 to complement his position as a fine art publisher by making some of the prints into cards. The business grew steadily reaching a peak of £10m turnover in the mid-90s. Following the sale of Paper Rose in March 2007, Hawkes founded Studio51. Until the sale of Paper Rose, Hawkes was the vice president of the Greeting Card Association and remains the president of his local Rotary Club.
West Suffolk Mind
West Suffolk Mind has been a registered charity since 1962 and has been affiliated to Mind National since 1986. Its mission is to work to better the lives of people experiencing mental health difficulties. West Suffolk Mind provides training, support, advice, ./guidance and counselling services for people in West Suffolk, over the age of 16, with mental health difficulties. It also provides services for their carers and families. Services (apart from some extended counselling courses) are free at point of delivery.

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.