# fundraisers

raise money with a shop instead of a donation page.

Pick a cause, put it on something people actually want to wear, and up to 40% of the profit on every item sold goes to the charity you name. No inventory, no minimum order, nothing bought up front.

how it works

1. You name the charity. A registered non-profit, not an individual. We sign a written agreement with them covering the split, the reporting and the term.
2. We build the shop. Designs for your cause, on the same garments and at the same prices as the rest of the catalog. It gets its own address and its own look.
3. People buy things. Everything is printed on demand, so nothing is made until it is ordered and nobody has to front any money — not you, not the charity, not us.
4. The charity is paid on the real numbers. Not on an estimate. See below, because this is the part most programmes are vague about and we would rather not be.

what "40% of the profit" actually means

It means 40% of what an item earns, and it does not mean 40% of what a customer pays. Those are very different numbers and the difference matters, so here it is in full.

Every order records what the item actually cost us — the blank, the printing, the postage and the card fee — because the vendor bills us per item and we store that against the order. The charity's share is computed from that recorded cost, not from a guess made in advance.

On a $27.99 tee, the profit after the garment, the print, the postage and card processing is roughly $3.40 to $9.70 depending on how the vendor bills the print. Forty percent of that is what the charity gets:

The range is real and we are not going to hide it: our own cost of goods is not fully settled with the vendor yet, and until it is, quoting one tidy number would be a guess dressed up as a fact. Before a fundraiser opens we confirm the exact per-item amount in writing, so the charity knows what a shirt is worth to them before the first one sells rather than after.

If someone offers you "40% of every sale" on a $28 shirt, ask them what their blank costs. Print on demand does not have that kind of room in it, and a promise that large is usually a promise about revenue being quietly settled out of profit.

why a shop and not a donation link

A donation page asks people to give something up. A shop gives them something back, and the people who buy end up wearing the cause around — which is the part a donation page cannot do at all. The trade is that a shirt raises less per supporter than a straight donation would, because a garment has to be made before it can be given away. Both things are true and you should pick with your eyes open.

what we need from you

• A registered charity and someone there who can sign. We pay the organisation directly, never an individual or a personal account.
• A written agreement before anything goes on sale. In much of the United States, a business advertising that part of a sale benefits a charity is a regulated arrangement with its own filing and disclosure rules, and several states require the contract and a registration before the first item is offered. We handle that paperwork, but it is the reason a fundraiser cannot start the same afternoon you ask.
• Some idea of what the shirt should say. You do not need a designer; you need an opinion.

what is honest to say about the state of this

This programme is open for conversations and not yet automated. The measurement is built and running — every order already records its true vendor cost, which is what makes an honest split possible at all — but the payout itself is arranged and sent by hand, and reporting is a statement rather than a live dashboard. We would rather run the first few personally and tell you that plainly than point you at a dashboard that does not exist.

start one

Tell us the cause, the charity and roughly how many people are likely to care about it, and we will come back with what the shop would look like and what the split works out to per item. Get in touch.