Hope for Afghan Children - Forum: Fundraising and Collaboration Ideas

hfac on Help needed urgently!

Wed, 02 Jun 2010 18:27:34 +0000

Please help. The orphanages are in desperate need of vehicles due to a very heightened security risk. Andeisha Farid's letter below will give you the details. If you can donate any amount, or help raise the $50,000 they need for the vehicles, please visit CharityHelp, scroll down to the "Make a donation of your choice" box, and help out. This is an urgent and special request.

Dear Friends, In just six months AFCECO has been catapulted from a quiet, grassroots organization to being one of the highest profile Afghan run NGOs. (See our web site for reports on NBC News, Vital Voices, and the White House Summit). At the start as now we adhere to our philosophy that, unlike many other NGOs we make certain 95% of every dollar raised goes directly to the children’s health, education, housing and food. We are all virtually volunteers. There are no high salaries, no luncheons, no SUVs. The blessings of our new high profile are many. A great influx of donations and sponsors designated specifically to increase the number of children we serve has made it possible to open several new orphanages in Kabul, Herat and Jalalabad. We are thrilled with these developments, but with this sudden growth we are faced with new challenges we could never have anticipated. The reality is to manage this growth and notoriety and to keep the orphanages running smoothly and safely we must immediately raise money towards the purchase of three vehicles, one each for Jalalabad, Herat and Kabul.

rosevines on Internationalness

Fri, 11 Sep 2009 17:26:00 +0000

News is that an Italian version of the AFCECO payment/sponsorship page is in the pipeline. Once this translation has been done, we'll probably put a step-by-step guide complete with screenshots on the Hope for Afghan Children site.

Also, Stephanie from CHI says they are moving to a new content management system which will have built-in multi-lingual support. This will make translation of all content doable. I'm not sure about the timeframe for this, but it's good to know it will be happening.

Kristen on Donate your gadgets!

Sat, 01 Aug 2009 20:48:31 +0000

I just checked the Gazelle page and am greatly impressed. Even with a time lag, I still think this is a great idea. Around $500 seems the perfect amount, and I really like the idea of recycling old gadgets to buy the orphanages new ones.

rosevines on Donate your gadgets!

Tue, 28 Jul 2009 15:30:14 +0000

There's about a month to run in the Gadget Drive. So far, we've raised $334 of the $590 needed to buy the sound system. However, that total is somewhat misleading: looking at the admin page for the drive, there are another $300 worth of donations still to be processed. If those donations are finalised, we'll have reached our target.

This is one thing I've noticed about the Gadget Drive: there's no instant gratification. It takes about 10 days from when you send in your donations until they are processed, a value assigned and the money shows up on the Gadget Drive page. It's a pity, because having an upwardly moving fundraising thermometer encourages others to contribute.

I'll be giving feedback to Gazelle (the company that runs the Gadget Drives) about this. It makes me more eager to have our own donation widgets. I'll tickle Mike and Stephanie at Charity Help about this, to see what progress is being made.

rosevines on Internationalness

Thu, 09 Jul 2009 15:50:37 +0000

Thanks, Doffie. It'll be great to have you as the point person on linking us internationally. I know there are people back home in Australia who are sponsors and a strong European contingent.

Nice shades, by the way.

Doffie on Internationalness

Thu, 09 Jul 2009 15:20:55 +0000

Like you, Rose, I am particularly eager to see this become an international site. I assume that we need consultations and help from Stephanie (CHI) and Andeisha/Jamshid (AFCECO) in order to find out how to contact and invite sponsors from the U.S. and all the other countries where sponsors reside. I will be very happy to do the coordination and be very active in this regard when the time comes. So, I'm volunteering, without knowing how much work that will involve. As you know, I'm enjoying my retirement from the working world and have plenty of time to devote to this.

rosevines on Donate your gadgets!

Wed, 08 Jul 2009 13:05:43 +0000

Thanks for the feedback, Kristen. I think you're right about the duplication.

I'm going to start publicising the site with our core group today, so hopefully we'll expand this conversation a little.

admin on Ready for your contributions

Wed, 08 Jul 2009 13:01:36 +0000

We're ready to rock and roll with the site. I've redone or updated most of the content, with the exception of the section on the street children of Kabul, which features Jamshid's photos. That will come soon. We're also waiting for CharityHelp's programmer to create our specialised donation widget. Once it's ready, we'll be able to set up special fundraisers and provide a donate button on our site or any other site that wants to get involved, such as Vets for Afghanistan. Each donation button will feature a fundraising thermometer, so we'll be to see how we're progressing towards each goal. At this stage, I want to encourage our small band of Facebook activists to register for the forums (thanks to Kristen for getting in early on this), contribute to the discussion, and put a hands up if you have anything to contribute to this blog. Blog items can be short - a few paragraphs - or moderately lengthy. Or they might simply be photos with captions. Topics can include background info about Afghanistan or reports of trips/experiences there; our orphanages; sponsoring; fundraising. Anything that furthers our goals of supporting AFCECO; making life better for all Afghans, especially the children; and building a useful network for sponsors. Once we have a core group here, then it'll be time to really launch the site. Stephanie from CharityHelp has offered to help us with this, and I'm gathering a list of Afghan-related sites we can contact. We'll also want to tweet and Facebook about it. If you have any suggestions for publicising the launch, please let me know. You can either respond to this post or post in the discussion groups. I'm very keen to make this an international site, so let's do what we can to encourage non-US sponsors to get involved. Rose

Kristen on Donate your gadgets!

Tue, 07 Jul 2009 13:01:02 +0000

I like that you've created a separate page for the drive that people can link to or post to Facebook, etc., and the photo you've put up of the art party is lovely. I also like that it directs to the discussion forum. I think that makes for an excellent, interactive site.

Information duplication isn't a bad idea in an era of fussy, fast readers such as myself. I am for it.

Anyone else out there have comments? Please feel welcome to register and participate here as Rose works to develop this amazing website!

rosevines on Donate your gadgets!

Tue, 07 Jul 2009 10:03:28 +0000

This is our first gadget drive and I'm interested to see how it goes once we start publicising the Hope for Afghan Children website. If it's a success, this could be a really good thing to do for a larger project. As well as publicising it online, we can recruit local schools and place gadget donation boxes at our work places, and encourage others to do so, too.

One important thing when gathering donations from others: make sure they include cables, batteries, manuals, software, cases and any other bits and pieces they still have. These greatly increase the value of donated items.

I also posted this topic partly to test a feature on this website which lets us simultaneously publish a blog post or new page on the site and place it in the discussions. I won't normally duplicate content in this way, but I wanted to try it out.

- Rose

admin on Donate your gadgets!

Tue, 07 Jul 2009 09:56:20 +0000

[caption id="attachment_152" align="alignright" width="400" caption="An art party at the orphanages"][/caption] Movie Night Magic

Don't throw away your old electronic gadgets! Donate them to our Movie Night Magic gadget drive and help buy a sound system for the 350 children in the AFCECO orphanages in Kabul. Movie nights and art parties are a big part of enriching the lives of the children. We want to give them something to party about by buying them a Sony Bravia 5-disc DVD/CD Home Theater System. [Note: Your donation will not be reflected on the fundraising "thermometer" until Gazelle has received it. We've already raised over $300 in a few days, but that won't show on the fundraiser page until it's processed - so don't be discouraged!]

What's a gadget drive?

A gadget drive lets you turn your used electronics into cash to support a cause. You can donate:

cell phones
PDAs;
camcorders, digital cameras and camera lenses;
notebook computers;
external hard drives;
gaming consoles and video games;
Blu-Ray players and DVD/Blu-Ray movies;
MP3 players and streaming media devices;
satellite radios;
GPS devices;
calculators.

To donate a gadget, just click the button below. On the donation page, you'll be able to find the value of the gadgets you would like to donate, and send them to Gazelle, the company that provides this program. Gazelle pays the shipping (within the continental USA) and all the money raised will go to the sound system fund.

More gadget drives to come

This is our first gadget drive. If it proves to be a success, we'll be holding more in the future. And if we exceed our goal this time, the money will still go directly to AFCECO. We'll put it towards one of the other items on AFCECO's Amazon wishlist.

Kristen on Afghanistan Stories

Tue, 07 Jul 2009 00:07:15 +0000

On June 30th, Veterans for Afghanistan put on our first-ever fundraising event to benefit AFCECO, called "Afghanistan Stories." There were six of us on stage, five Army veterans and one civilian humanitarian worker, all telling true stories about our very real experiences on the ground in Afghanistan. I'd initially billed this as an hour-long event, but we ended up telling stories for two and a half hours! But the audience laughed and cried with us and stayed glued to what was happening on stage. And they were generous, too! A small crowd of fewer than 20 people raised $373 in cash, plus some later donations brought our total for the evening up to $500. The manager of the Belleville Lounge in Brooklyn didn't charge us any overhead, so all of the funds went to AFCECO. We will definitely do more of these events. It meant a lot to each of us to tell our stories, our audience seemed moved by what we said, and the kids in Kabul get to benefit. That's a win-win-win situtation!