Anyone like to give an e-card this Christmas?

I think paying £1 for an e-card is ridiculous! I’m all for donating money to charity, but ‘selling’ an e-card for that amount of money is just wrong. Once designed, e-cards cost virtually nothing to send/maintain. There are no manufacturing costs, obviously, like a traditional ‘card’. Even the bulk rate that you offer of 20p a card isn’t exactly value for money. I do appreciate what you’re trying to do, I just think there are better/more honest ways to raise money for good causes – I’d rather send free e-cards and just donate some cash to my chosen charity at my own discretion.

Obviously that’s my choice – am just expressing my opinion, and making sure people realise there is no sizeable recurring cost to running a site like yours, and they can send free e-cards if they prefer!

Merry Christmas!

Natts

Posted over 3 years ago by whenthiswasfields

Hello Natts

I think you are missing the point.

The money charged is immaterial. As you say, once designed, it costs virtually nothing. What you are doing is making a public declaration of your donation to charity. This has two effects:

1. It makes you look good. And, indeed, charitable.

2. It raises awareness of both the charity and the ecard site. This is something that doesn’t happen if you just donate directly to a charity.

Just imagine – you send a charity ecard to 5 people, and then they send charity ecards to 5 of their friends, and then they send charity ecards to 5 of their friends. You’ve started a chain that means that, er, loads of ecards have been sent and loads of money AND awareness has been raised for charity.

This can only be a good thing.

Now, what the charity ecard site needs to aim towards is to give 100% of your donation to the charity, and take their costs from the recovered Gift-Aid. Which I am sure, in time, they will do.

Would that make you happier? Would it?

Merry Christmas to you too

Pandini

Posted over 3 years ago by Pandini

Why not send charity e-cards and then make a donation to charity yourself. That way you save paper and energy by not sending ‘real’ cards to be delivered, charity gets money, and charity also gets the promotion of having someone send their branded cards. Yay.

NCH have got some nice ones. http://www.nch.org.uk/index.php?i=87

Posted over 3 years ago by jd28

Sorry Pandini, I think you’ve missed the point. Only 50% of the fee is going to charity and I just dont think thats good enough. There are zillions of websites out there that dont charge a penny for this kind of thing, hosting a site in 2007 is not actually very expensive thanks to free CMS portals (e107, joomla, etc) and cheap comprehensive hosts (uk2.net, etc).

The donation to charity instead of Christmas cards thing has been going on for a longtime now, lets not pretend its because we all care so much, lets be honest, it saves us a whole bunch of time and hassle. I send cards to people I care about, and do the charity thing for people I feel obliged to send cards to, eg work colleagues I dont really like etc.

Why bother with the tacky ecards at all, make the donation, send out an emails to explain what you’ve done. Please dont pretend anyone finds those stupid cards anything but irritating – sending them to my work email address is just a waste of time, how many of us cant even view the stupid things, not that id want to.

I also think its niave to suggest people then just make a donation, because again, lets be honest, if they dont pay out up front, they probably never will…

Posted over 3 years ago by dead_eye_jones