Another Pipe Dream Being Sold To Nonprofits

Because of the traffic on my website www.nonprofitexpert.com I receive a lot of email. Many times email is from individuals needing specific help or the nonprofit organizations themselves or board members with a specific question. Regardless, I am happy to answer these questions and help, that is what I do.

However, I also receive quite a few emails from companies either wanting to advertise on my site, which I am very picky who I allow, or people that want to promote the next great fundraising idea that will make nonprofit organizations able to walk on easy street.

Once again I received an email telling me about this wonderful opportunity where nonprofits can create a residual income stream, blab, blab, and blab. This statement alone in and of itself is a clue as to the line of bull that is surely to follow.

The nonprofit only has to pay a one time fee to get started of $199 and then $29 a month. Then, all they have to do is get their donors and friends and enemies and people they don’t know to shop online and the money will pour in or so the claim goes. Ugh!

All this nonsense makes a huge assumption that nonprofits are going to have the time, energy and effort to convince all their donors or people involved with their organization to magically and overnight change all their ingrained buying habits that they have established over the years as well as forgo all the discounted prices they can get at Wal-Mart, Sams or other retail stores not to mention the convenience of shopping locally to go to a website no one has heard of before and where the nonprofit will only get a few pennies from purchases made.

This pitch even said the average return for active sites was a whopping $2 to $4 a month. Yep right…. So to pay for the annual cost for the first year of $547 i.e. $199 plus $29 X 12 using you have to have 138 suckers… oops I mean donors to use this lame website site to make a purchase just to break even, assuming you will get $4 back from their purchases. That is of course is with the moon in the seventh house and Jupiter is aligned with Mars which I sure happens quite often, right?

In this presentation there was also an example of how easy it would be for a nonprofit to have a residual income of $3,600 annually.

My closing comment to this bozo was for him to ask the company to provide me with a list of nonprofits that have made the quoted $3600 annually from this program after expenses. My guess is there will be no such list.

Folks, I’m sorry but there is no easy fundraising program that will make hundreds of dollars for nonprofits with little to no effort.

Regardless, I’m sure people will keep looking and I will keep getting these ridiculous emails, but then again they can become blog entries!