Go to http://pages.ebay.com/charity/ and you will see the huge number of charity auctions that are on the sites. If you would like to make money this way, you can arrange these auctions -- and handle the details -- for various groups who have never considered this idea and don’t have the expertise to handle it. You make your profit by charging a certain percentage of the total revenue.
If this type of auction business appeals to you, specialize in handling auctions for all kinds of groups. You can stage charity auctions for schools, athletic organizations and church groups, as well as regular charitable causes.
Here are the steps on eBay for creating a charity auction...1) Get approval from eBay for your organization or cause. They also will require some information at the time of the auction such as the name of a contact person, a brief synopsis of your organization and examples of items you would like to list.
2) Create an “About Me” page, explaining your organization and what it does. The only difference between your auction page and your personal page is that you should change Feedback to “Show no feedback” and change “Items for Sale” to “Show all items.” eBay further suggests that you may want to include your logo for your organization at the top of your About Me page.
3) Have e-Bay link your listings to the “Charity page” which gets a lot of attention.If you wanted to set up and manage charity auctions, what can you sell for an organization? First, you can find new merchandise that can be bought for a bargain price. You can auction an event or service. You can get gift donations from community members or merchants.
Another possibility is to convince a company to sponsor your cause. Underline the fact that it would provide great publicity for the company. In fact, a lot of the Charity pages are really ads for a particular company.
If you are really ambitious, you can often find celebrities who will participate by donating items, their name or their time. For the past Paralympic games in Australia, many celebrities contributed art and their contributions were featured on the front page of eBay Australia.
Visit http://pages.ebay.com/community/charity/success.html for success stories involving charities and auction sites.
Charity auctions are a great excuse for a media fest. And, by extension, they are great publicity opportunities for your auction business. Local media love interesting, colorful local stories and an Internet charity auction is definitely different.
Send news releases. Call radio and TV stations. Inquire as to whether or not anyone else in the group has some media contacts.For example, a local business man sponsored an auction of products from his company. Some of the products were auctioned on the Internet. Some were done through the local cable TV station when they were sponsoring a fundraising drive. Most of the volunteers working the phones...
... were his employees, wearing company T-shirts. He was interviewed repeatedly, and gave away merchandise to callers pledging certain amounts. His business increased dramatically as did the traffic to his Web page and auction sites.
