Amazon Wish Lists Simplify Charities’ Requests for Needed Goods
By Raymund Flandez
Couples count on online wedding registries to get desired
gifts from families and friends.
Now nonprofits are using the
approach to get gifts they need
to provide services and run
their operations. Instead of a
five-piece china set and a gravy boat, charities are receiving
boxes of cereal, jars of peanut
butter, and packs of deodorant
from generous online donors,
delivered at the door. The Web
site that’s making those gifts
possible: Amazon.com.
Through the popular online retailer’s Wish List pages,
which allow people to designate
specific products they would like
to receive, nonprofits—
especially small ones—are increasingly taking advantage of the
free and relatively easy way to
get much-needed supplies and
products. Such donated goods
account for hundreds of gifts
and thousands of dollars each
year for the homeless shelters,
soup kitchens, medical mission
groups, and children’s charities
that have tried the approach.
“The items that we’re getting
are specific to what our needs
are,” says Kimberly Lyons-Bri-ley, development and volunteer
manager at Martha’s Table, a
hunger-relief and youth-educa-tion organization in Washington.
Before it started an Amazon
Wish List last fall, the group
created its own wish list, which
it posted on its Web page, but
the list wasn’t updated often
and didn’t describe why certain
items were needed. As a result,
some of the donated goods it
received were random and not
timely, like boxes of stuffing
mix during the summer.
So far, Martha’s Table has received a total of $2,500 worth
of donations of cans of tomato
soup, boxes of pasta, and school
uniforms that it has requested
on its Wish List.
Posting a Wish List on Amazon enabled Martha’s Table to receive more appropriate product gifts than it got in the past.
Child’s Play, a charity that provides toys for children’s
hospitals, raised a third of its total gifts last
year using Amazon’s Wish List feature.
making it easier for officials to
anticipate and plan for the arrival of gifts. Some charities,
too, have found that they can
reap yet more dividends by
agreeing to send traffic to Amazon in their messages promoting
the Web lists; the retailer gives
the groups up to 15 percent of
the purchase price.
The online wish lists do have
a major drawback: The charity
doesn’t usually know who sent
a gift and thus has no way to
thank the donor or try to build
ties unless contact information
was included with the shipped
items. (Amazon says it’s unable
to reveal the identity of customers due to confidentiality terms.
However, it said, it can send a
message to gift givers to connect them with the charity.)
“We don’t have a way to thank
them,” says Marchelle Sellers,
executive director of Mending
Kids International, which provides surgery to children in developing countries. Some charities have worked around the obstacle by including a message
in their wish-list profile box
urging potential donors to add
their names to a note they can
append to the gift items during
checkout. But charities say that
is not a great solution.
“We want to be able to rec-
ognize the giving to encourage
them to give more,” says Ms.
Sellers, whose charity has re-
ceived about $1,500 worth of
gifts through the wish-list pro-
gram since it began participat-
ing last year. She says if do-
nors don’t get an acknowledg-
ment of their gifts, they’re less
likely to be supportive the next
time around. “The donor doesn’t
know that we’re not going to
know who sent those boxes,”
she says.
Online Buying
Creating an Amazon Wish
List page isn’t difficult. A char-
ity signs up for an Amazon ac-
count and fills out some infor-
mation in the profile box, such
as location, federal-tax iden-
tification number, and Web
site address. Then, the chari-
ty’s staff members can search
through Amazon’s vast online
store to look for items to add to
the group’s wish list, flagging
goods needed immediately and
specifying the desired quantity.
Later, the charity can alert sup-
porters by e-mail, on its home
page, or through social networks
about opportunities to give. The
donor pays for the goods.
Streamlined Giving
While Amazon’s customers
have been able to create wish-list pages for years, nonprofits
have only recently begun to use
the product registry to boost donations amid a sluggish economy. Amazon wouldn’t say how
many charities now use the lists
or how much in total donations
these groups have received.
But a look at participating organizations reveals that charities are finding wish lists to be
a crucial addition to their fund-raising, especially at a time
when demand for their services has risen. Some participants
say the Amazon program has
helped them cut down on overhead, since donors have helped
them buy supplies and equipment such as office chairs that
staff members need.
Other groups say the use
of a wish list has helped them
streamline the way they seek
and receive noncash donations,
Shopping Site Helps Children’s Charity Grow
As more and more charities
use the online retailer Amazon’s Wish List feature to solicit
donated goods from supporters,
one organization has figured out
a way to double the program’s
benefits.
The Wish List, an online gift
registry that allows charities
to ask donors for specific products, has been a big asset in the
growth of Child’s Play, a Seattle
charity founded by the video-game industry.
Kristin Lindsay, a foundation
coordinator at the organization,
which donates video games,
books, and toys to children’s
hospitals, started using a wish
list in 2004. Last year, about a
third of its total donations, or
about $1-million worth of noncash gifts, came from Amazon’s
Wish List program.
“Honestly, we owe a large
amount of our success to Am-
azon,” she says. For the first
year, the group distributed toys
to five hospitals; it now has 75
hospitals in its worldwide net-
work that receive donated prod-
ucts from Amazon.
Benefits From Referrals
Each hospital in the Child’s
Play network helps create a wish
list of toys and video games that
it wants for its young patients.
Child’s Play takes the idea a
step further than many other
charities though. It has signed
up to be one of the organizations
that drives traffic to Amazon,
and in exchange, it gets a share
of the money Amazon receives
from the clients it refers.
Here’s how it works: Child’s
Play embeds a special link on
all its promotional messages
about the wish list that includes
a code identifying the charity as
the source of the traffic to Am-
azon. When supporters click on
the link, they are sent to Ama-
zon’s Web site. The charity then
gets a cut, of up to about 15 per-
cent, depending on the product,
each time a donor enters the
Amazon site and buys goods
through that link.
