NBC is debuting a new series on June 24 called The Philanthropist, which “chronicles the heroic adventures of a billionaire playboy turned vigilante philanthropist. James Purefoy (”Rome”) stars as Teddy Rist, a successful tycoon whose life is forever changed after rescuing a young boy during a hurricane in the Nigerian town he was visiting. Rist is spontaneous and impulsive and quickly decides to channel his passion, power and money into helping those in need.”

I love the idea — a young, successful handsome man driven to use his ‘powers’ for good.  Who wouldn’t want to be Rist?  Well, hopefully the show will be a huge success and inspire a mass movement of doing good, sort of like everyone getting the Jennifer Aniston ‘Friends’ haircut.

That’s what shopping at BiddingForGood.com is all about.   There are thousands of everyday and unique products and services up for bid by reputable charities every day.  Shop there first for your next vacation deal, tickets to sporting and concert events, electronics, dining, etc.  You’ll get a good deal and the charity will get the proceeds.  Win/win.

You don’t have to be a billionaire to make a difference.  Need a few more ideas, here are a couple to start — do you know of any others?

BiddingForGood.com – a portal to online charity auctions where all the proceeds go to the organization.

FreeRice.com — donate rice to help end hunger by playing a word game.

JustGive.org — helps find a cause you care about with ideas for how to support.

TheBreastCancerSite.com — for each click of the pink ribbon, sponsors donate money for research and treatment.

I’d love to hear of other ideas.

It should be a surprise to nobody that securing items has never been harder in an economy where almost every hotel, restaurant, and merchant is down year over year. With less items to be had the competitive intensity is up. What to do?

Transform your “ask” from a charitable donation to a marketing ROI. Fundraising auctions have a ton of underlying marketing goodness but charitable organizations rarely deliver on this promise. Frequently we see auctions listed in www.biddingforgood.com that have item descriptions which deliver minimal marketing value for the vendor.

But fundraising auctions are a killer advertising/promotional channel for item donors to reach consumers. Specifically, auctions do three key things that marketers like;

• Fundraising auctions reach an attractive demographic. Bidders are on the whole noticeably more affluent than the general population which means they have more purchasing power
• Fundraising auctions reach these consumers through trusted causes these people support and care about
• And perhaps most importantly, fundraising auctions reach these consumers while their wallets are wide open.

To take advantage of these dynamics you should create a one-sheet that explains the marketing benefits of participating in your auction. Give a sense of the demographics of your constituency. List the most popular categories of items from last years auction (message; our people want what you have). In key categories like dining, entertainment, and travel try to estimate how much your constituency purchases in a year by estimating the typical average purchase and multiplying by the total constituency. This helps give the vendor a sense of the size of the market you are helping him/her reach.

The key point here is to make this a marketing/advertising pitch, not a charitable donation ask.

Finally, online fundraising auctions enable clickable links, multiple graphic images, and a much higher degree of measureability. For the marketer, online is where the eyeballs are going so putting your auction online only helps support their need to have a greater marketing presence on the internet.

It’s a tough economy out there, and local hotels, restaurants and other businesses that you depend on for donations to your auction catalog are feeling the pinch too.  With fewer paying customers, they have more capacity, and as a result, fewer dollars for marketing.  At the same time, more and more cause groups are coming seeking donations to fill their budget gaps.  Normally happy to support a good cause, local merchants are putting a cap on their contributions and increasingly looking for value for their donation.

By putting your auction online, you ensure that your item request rises to the top of the heap because you can provide measurable marketing results for their generosity in three valuable ways:

1.  Exposure — With a physical auction, their donation is limited to those at the gala at best. There’s only one winner and information on potential ‘losing bidders’ is lost.   But putting that same item online opens it to tens of thousands of qualified consumers. Based on 5,000 charity auctions, we know that the average online auction bidder is female, between 30 and 49 with a HHI exceeding $120K– a sweet spot for any marketer.  In the last four months alone, these consumers have diverted $6.2 million to charities by purchasing donated items online.

2.  Guaranteed customer – Without any effort or expense on their part, you’ve brought them a highly qualified, paying customer.  Once onsite, that customer is likely to bring friends, book another room night, spend money on room service, etc.

3.  Qualified leads – don’t forget all the other people who bid on that item!  These are potential customers who are interested and willing to pay for that item.  That’s invaluable marketing data to share with the donor that allows them to reach out to the ‘losing bidders’ and offer them perhaps a discount on a future visit.

There’s a host of other marketing benefits such as brand consistency, up-sells, click throughs, geo-targeting, and brand association with charitable causes.  By using the power of the internet to reach tens of thousands of customers and capture valuable analytics, you become a valuable marketing partner with a unique, highly effective and measurable marketing platform to give in exchange.

cMarket works with dozens of partners who are placing products in these auctions because of the strong marketing ROI.  To learn more about these items or for more information you can use to take on your ‘asks’, contact Lisa at marketing@cmarket.com.

Well, I was off by a few days.  Yesterday (not tomorrow as I predicted) we crossed the $65m mark. That’s about $5m in the last 30 days.

Not a bad way to make a living.

It was only a month ago that we crossed the threshold of $60m raised. Now a month later we’re days short of $65m raised.  To be precise right now we are at $64,788,359…….

I’m guessing we cross $65m on may 8th.  Cha ching!

A little over a year ago we embarked on a program that we call Product Placement where we approached merchants on behalf of charities with a proposal that they would donate hundreds of items in exchange for a strong marketing ROI.  In essence we said, ‘don’t do this just to be charitable- do this because you will get tangible marketing results that will help your business.’

Well, 14 months later we’ve secured almost $3million worth of donations now going into various charity auctions to kick start or supplement their catalogs.   Gift cards from Reebok and DKNY. One week vacations in Cancun. Weekend stays in 4 and 5 star luxury hotels and country Inns. Limo services. Sports tickets… The list goes on and is growing rapidly.

The lesson? Merchants, inundated with charitable requests, respond if you can communicate a tangible marketing benefit. And auctions have one very elegant marketing aspect to them that I believe is critical to unlocking item donations. There is a guaranteed marketing ROI- the merchant never gives up anything until a customer who has paid money shows up at the front door to redeem their gift certificate, in which case they are a prime target to be upsold and cross-sold.

So, the moral of the story is that if you want to get more and better items to attract more bidders, you have to show what’s in it for the item donor. And if its a commercial enterprise in today’s economy they want — need– marketing. Which is good because you can give them valuable marketing exposure in your online auction catalogue as well as drive a paying custmer or two to their front door.

We just crossed a threshold on a metric that I hold dear- the amount of money we have helped worthy causes raise. As of a few days ago we have helped raise over $60 million.

And www.biddingforgood.com had over 400,000 unique visits in March.

Feels pretty good. Not a bad way to make a living.

I just saw the new Harris poll suggesting that folks are giving less to fewer causes. Sorta sounds right as in soft economic times folks pull in. And it reminds me why auctions are so important in today’s environment where the demand for services is going up while fundraising dollars are going down.

Fundraising auctions are their own unique “profit pool”. By this I mean that these are dollars that will mostly not be accessed any other way because in this transaction there is an exchange of value and dollars come out of discretionary spending budgets vs. the giving budget.

One of the reasons www.biddingforgood.com has gotten such traction (over 300,000 unique visitors in March driving 20% of winning bid revenue across all our auctions) is there is a vast consumer population that will be more than glad to buy/bid on stuff if the dollars go to support charity.

Why?

It makes them feel good about themselves. Which means they will come back.

We are finishing up Q1 later today and we will have run 50%+ more auctions than a year ago (600+ vs. 419). When times are tough it’s sorta hard to conclude that you will have the same outcome unless you do SOMETHING differently. And hundreds and hundreds of local and national organizations are concluding that going online with their auction enables them to get more items, more bidders, and that all this will raise more money.

Pretty straightforward; I-B-M (items x bidders = more money).

Congratulations to Reebok and Super Bowl MVP Santonio Holmes for raising $70,200 for the Sickle Cell Anemia Disease Association of America through the online auction hosted on BiddingForGood.com  The gloves are the same Mr. Holmes wore and caught the game-winning touch down pass with, propelling the Pittsburgh Steelers to their sixth Super Bowl title, an NFL record.  163 bids were placed on this one item proving there are pockets of money available to nonprofits by offering items to a larger consumer marketplace.

I recently did an interview with Mass High Tech. The thrust of the article was around how non-profit fundraising is in the dumps and causing more folks to explore new approaches that involve technology, in our case BiddingforGood.com. The interview prompted me to step back and ask the bigger question of what is going on right now relative to the economy and fundraising.

In essence the U.S. is entering what is likely to be a prolonged period where it re balances its excesses. Using the metaphor of the seven plentiful years and the seven lean years it would appear that not only did we not save during the seven plentiful years, we actually spent it all and then some by borrowing. This means that the re-adjustment process (sometimes called de-leveraging) almost has to be painful (no such thing as a free lunch and the borrowed lunches have to be paid back–with interest).

The impact on fundraising is that discretionary consumer budgets are going to be tougher to access. This puts a premium on innovation and trying new things. Internet based fundraising has advantages in that it is another channel of funds and makes the process much more convenient for the donor.

Auctions tap a very different “profit pool” than do classical fundraising efforts which draw from the donor’s charitable giving budget. Auctions draw from the donors household spending budgets (dining, travel/vacations, entertainment, etc). These are dollars you are not likely to otherwise tap if not for the auction.

And when funding sources start to dry up one needs to leverage each profit pool as much as possible to maximize the yield each can provide.