Charitable gift cards may be the way to go

Clara Goodwin was tired of asking the same friends and family members to buy a candy bar or raffle ticket for her son’s hockey team.

Like most parents of school-age children, Goodwin found herself lugging boxes of chocolates to work, cajoling friends and family to buy tickets for casino trips or magazine subscriptions. Once she was almost roped into selling fresh chickens as a means to fundraise.

“I was going back to the same group of people asking for money and I began to feel bad. It was tedious, always going with your hat in your hands,” she said.

And when her younger daughter picked up an expensive hobby — costumes for Emily’s competitive dancing lessons cost upwards of $600 a year — Goodwin was relieved to find a more convenient, less burdensome way to raise funds.

Buying gift cards through fundraising companies requires no out-of-pocket costs but remains a lesser known way of raising money for schools, sports teams, churches and faith-based groups.

And it’s a win-win situation for both retailers and fundraisers, says Christopher Hill, president and CEO of the Montreal-based program, FundScrip.

Here’s how it works: Fundscrip gets a volume discount from major retailers across the country to buy large quantities of their cards. Supporters buy the cards at face value, and up to 10 per cent of their purchase goes back to the non-profit group. And before you ask, Hill emphasizes, “There is no catch.”

Buyers pay for their everyday purchases — gas, groceries, gifts and household items — using gift cards and raising money with little effort.

“This is money you’re spending anyways. You buy $100 from us, and you get a $100 gift card,” he said.

Fundscrip has about 100 retailers on board ranging from Petro-Canada, The Bay, Loblaws, The Home Depot, Starbucks, Cineplex, The Gap and Chapters.

Like a loyalty card, donors can support a cause or group without paying out of pocket. Meanwhile, retailers benefit because they’re acquiring new customers and getting new traffic into their stores.

“Retailers are willing to pay for that, it’s part of their marketing expense,” Hill said. “We have a program to get new customers and engender loyalty.”

Retailers also benefit from targeted customers — often, they’ve got the full attention of the head of the household.

Goodwin, a medical technologist, says she uses the cards for the family’s everyday purchases. She estimates she spends $600 a week in gift cards to pay for the family’s groceries, fuel their three cars, buy her morning coffee, and the family’s Friday night dinner ritual at East Side Mario’s.

Goodwin also administers the fundraising for the Scarborough dance academy where her daughter practises, and said that between the studio’s 40 moms, they’ve raised $10,000 in two years to offset the cost of their kids’ costumes. And as any church group or sports team fundraiser knows, that’s no chump change: raising that kind of money normally takes a whole production team, months of planning and a lot of good faith in generous friends.

“With gift card fundraising, you only need one person to administer this thing,” she said.

To qualify as a non-profit group, Fundscrip collects Canada Revenue Agency Charitable Organization numbers, and organizers must declare what they’re raising the money for.

Fundscrip also has a Not-For-Profit-Group Agreement that group administrators must sign prior to being accepted into the program.