Better fundraising is actually possible!

Word Count: 341

January 5th, 2008 | Alan | Earning Money, Best Buys, Website Review

You know the kind of fundrasing that we’ve seen for years now. Cookie sales, magazine sales, gift wrap sales, those door to door types that usually come when you’re really busy at the moment, and they’re trying to sell you something you really don’t need or even want, yet they manage to make you feel guilty if you don’t buy something. Well, there’s a new site that I was introduced to today, and it looks more promising. The site is called “Shoutback”. Shoutback has a really cool feature, a feature that could be the fundraiser of the future. To test it out, I signed up for an account.

The activation email took a while to arrive, a little longer than I expected. After a while, I tried signing in, but it didn’t work, so I clicked on the button saying that I had forgot my password. I got an error, saying that my account did not exist. So, figuring that maybe I had done something wrong, I tried signing up again, only to get an error that my email account had already been used to sign up. (I checked the spam inbox to make sure it didn’t end up there, but no luck) I know of some sites where the registration email takes up to one hour to arrive, and this could be one of those. When I do get the registration email, I’ll test it out, but until then, the site seems great except it would be much better with simply a quicker email system.

There are plenty of organizations that I know could use a great auction feature, such as the local elementary, middle, and high schools and all of their sports teams and artistic (music, theater, visual) programs. So many of them in the area try the same fundraisers over and over, and they just get saturated and are no longer effective. It would be better for both us and them if they used a more original approach such as the one that Shoutback offers.