Layout:
Home > Category: Website

Viewing the 'Website' Category

New Blog & Money Raised

May 20th, 2007 at 11:27 am

Lots to update - first I have moved this blog to its own blogging page from my personal finance blog since I will also have entries here listed on the

Text is microloan website and Link is http://www.donatecards.com
microloan website that we are building.

Last week was extremely busy on the sites, and even though I didn't update, a lot happened. All the auctions ended and all the people have paid which brought in an extra $337 plus the $100 from buy it now auctions making the total for distribution $437. That gives us enough to give out 17 loans with a bit left over. We have already made 13 loans and I will make another 4 write after I finish writing this entry.

Unfortunately with everything going on I wasn't able to list any auctions last week so there won't be any new income for a least another week. I am hoping to list another 10 auctions or so although I don't think this next ones will bring in quite as much money. Still, every dollar helps and hopefully we can add another couple hundred to the pot.

Idea For Microloan Site

May 20th, 2007 at 11:11 am

Nate and I have come up with the following idea in our quest to help Kiva.org as part of the $20 challenge. We sat down and thought about what type of organization could we start that could help raise money without actually having to ask people for money donations. That's when we came up with the idea of donating cards.

Originally the idea of the site was that there are a lot of people who receive gift cards that they never use. For those people who had gift cards that they were not going to use, we were going to set up a site where they could donate those gift cards. We would then sell the gift cards with the profits going toward microloans.

As we thought about this more, we decided we shouldn't just limited it to gift cards, but every type of card there is out there. For example, I know that there is a lot of value in old baseball cards since that is how I partially paid for my college education. I also know from living in Japan that used telephone cards have a lot of value to collectors for the designs on them. The more we thought about it, the more we realize that we could accept any type of card that people might have and no longer need and set up a site where we could resell those.

That is the current plan for this endeavor. The site is not set up yet (although we have purchased the domain name), but we should have the basics up this month. We realize that due to the amount of time that we must spend on the current sites that we will not be able to commit a lot of time to building this project at the beginning, but we hope that slowly but surely we can turn it into a site that can raise money for giving out microloans.

I feel that it will be an interesting project and one that will be worth while. It should be interesting to see how it grows from the very beginning and what it will eventually become.