The amount humans can achieve is directly proportional to the number of things we don't have to understand.

William McKnight, 3M

Cambrian House began as a crowdsourcing community using a wisdom of crowds based approach to discover new business and technology ideas. These pages are being kept online as a technology demo to showcase Chaordix™.

Looking to harness the power of your crowd? Find out about Chaordix™ - technology that enables enterprises to get the most out of crowdsourcing.

Ideas

View next idea in this round »

Online auctions for NPOs

Submitted by: SDelbecque
Created: Jul 12, 2007, 9:49 pm

Join Cambrian House

People

Ideas

Businesses

Connect with talented people. Collaborate on ideas. Realize your vision.

Not freeish. Not freesque. It's free!

The Elevator Pitch

For fans and supporters of famous people who want to support a good cause the Auctions for NPOs is a n auction site that proposes items from famous people. Unlike eBay our product allows NPOs and associations to gain money and visibility..

The Idea

Famous people often want to have a good image, they support non-profit organisations and associations to give a bit of their celebrity to a cause.
Non-profit organisations and associations need visibility to receive donations from the audience.

The web site would propose these famous people to talk about their association and sell personal items to the public in order to collect money for the association.
80% of the money collected through the items sales goes to the association, the remaining for the web site.

Benefits for:
- people: image, visibility
- association: visibility, donations
- buyers: unique items, good cause

Win-win-win.

The Logo

I thought of this idea when I was...

Comments Posted

vanhees Posted: July 13, 2007, 12:38 am

A lot of organisations use ebay/paypal for exactly what you describe. Do they take 20%?
Tommy

SDelbecque Posted: July 13, 2007, 10:52 am

The idea is here to create a dedicated place where the famous people (say a singer, an athlet or a designer) promotes the association/NPO via a dedicated page. This can also include community tools such as comments, message boards or blogs to create a circle around a cause.

The auction part aims at giving more visibility and some money to the association.

jill Posted: July 18, 2007, 7:59 pm

The non-profit world is becoming very sophisticated and branding is as big to them as it is in the for-profit world. Not every non-profit would necessarily be receptive to a generic / shared fundraising thing that is as open-ended as you describe.

On the other hand, if you could demonstrate that this solution dramatically reduces the cost of fundraising, there are donors and non-profits who would find that appealing.

What I'm not getting from this idea is the sizzle. If a celeb wants to endorse a charity, they can do it right now. Why would they come to you?

And without celebs, where is the excitement of this site?

I am left wondering whether your objective is to raise funds more efficiently, or to provide some kind of celebrity-based experience for donors.

Maybe you have some more thoughts to share. To focus my question: how does your solution improve upon the present situation?

saigon Posted: July 18, 2007, 10:30 pm

what makes your concept enticing for those Celebs? Any marketing plan?

Hello!

Ideas