If you’re going on a missions trip this Summer (or ever), you know raising funds isn’t easy!
You’ve called all your friends and family, you’ve sent emails to your entire address book, you’ve Tweeted, Facebooked and YouTubed yourself to death, and still haven’t reached your goal.
If only there was a cool way to stream-line your fundraising efforts online, and even provide follow-up with all those wonderful people who helped you on your way.
There is:
YouCanSend.me is a very creative fund-raising solution. You can use it to raise funds for just about anything!
Whether you’re raising money for a mission trip, youth camp, seniors trip, around the world adventure, honeymoon, or just trying to get away from the kids for a bit, fund-raising has never been so easy. In less than 5 minutes you can create your very own personalized fund-raising site. How cool is that!?!
If you can use Facebook, you can do this. Upload a picture of yourself, fill in information about your trip, provide a PayPal account to receive funds, and you’re ready to to begin the first step in your adventure: fund raising!
YouCanSend.me does more than just help you ask and raise support. Your personalized fund-raising site is packaged with a fully functional blog setup, allowing you to keep your supporters updated through the entire process. Pictures, posts, comments, all in one place, for only $10 a month!
That’s a small investment for such a functional and fundraising centric tool, especially when you figure the duration you’ll need the service. YouCanSend.me is full of cool features:
- Ease of donation with PayPal integration
- Progress tracking
- Supporter involvement
- Page customization
Plus, YouCanSend.me gives you email, Facebook, and Twitter sharing, so you can put your site in the hands of hundreds of potential supporters without the hassle of the traditional stamp & envelope fund-raising routine, and having to hop around to multiple social network sites.
What are you waiting for, put YouCanSend.me to work for you!
PaulSteinbrueck says
Eric, thanks for blogging about this. My wife and I are leading a team from our church to Kenya this summer are about to send out support letters this week (in addition to doing some blogging & social media). This could be a big help. The only thing it doesn’t adequately address is the tax-deductibility of the donations. Their FAQs sort of address this, but their answer sounds like “you and the charity you’re working with need to figure this out and be clear about it” rather than providing specific guidance.
Eric Dye says
As missionaries on the field, we too have had a hard time with this. This is what we found:
If person-A gives through the church, our church can provide them tax-deducible junk. If they give directly to us, they do not.
Either way, when the money hits our hands, we have to report the income to the IRS :-/ If you’re church is handling the plane tickets, etc … then you don’t need to worry about reporting.
If you have any more questions, feel free to ask. This is not official tax advice, nor am I fully qualified to do so. I’m simply speaking from my own research and experience. 🙂
Graham says
Just sent this on to my youth directors! They just did an offline version of this when they raised money for a group to visit Haiti last month. 🙂
Eric Dye says
Sweet!
Stephen Bateman says
Update on this: Just created one in 2.5 hours, soup to nuts.
It’s still a bit rough around the edges as a system, but it certainly did the job.
http://youcansend.me/stephen/ <~~ Check it out!
Eric Dye says
Awe-some!!!