eBay Giving Works: Helping Causes & Communities
Meet Mulberry Church: Big Hearts + Big Thinking = Big Impact
In the far-away town of Houma, La. there is a small Baptist church called Mulberry, which recently hosted one of the most sophisticated online fundraisers eBay Giving Works has seen. In an effort to fund their third trip to Haiti to build homes for earthquake victims, Mulberry Church members decided to auction off donated items that flooded in from their generous community. Since there were no resources to host a physical auction event, the group figured it ought to go big and take the auction online to eBay.
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Meet Mulberry Church: Big Hearts + Big Thinking = Big Impact
While their eBay experience was limited, Mulberry Church members recalled the blue and gold eBay Giving Works ribbons on eBay.com and knew there was a good home for their cause there.
The group’s initial goal was to raise $6,000 from their eBay auction, enough to build one duplex on a 34-acre development in the coastal port town of St. Marc in western Haiti. Led by church member and deacon Hank Babin, pastor Steve Graves and secretary Haley Kraemer, the group modeled their seller account on ESPN’s successful and well-publicized eBay auction for the cancer foundation established in memory of the late basketball coach Jimmy V.
“We knew we needed to make this auction an event,” said Hank, “to generate interest and fever.” So with barely any resources, the small group blasted family and friends with emails and letters about the auction and organized a regional media blitz, which landed them a donated, digital billboard, a story in the local paper, a spot on the local radio stations, a local TV appearance and mentions on regional stations as far away as Baton Rouge.
They had successfully built frenzy around their auction for Haiti.
The next step was to set up the auction on eBay. Hank set it up so that each item—from least to most valuable—was listed five minutes apart on the same day. Items included LSU and Saints football tickets, Taylor Swift concert tickets, vacations, trips, cooking experiences and more. This five-minute-apart arrangement caused all the auction items to end on the same day, with the small ones selling early on and the larger ones selling in the last moments, garnering higher prices. He planned the timing so precisely that the largest item would remain open for bidding until after kids were asleep, to keep buyers completely focused on the auction.
“I still remember when our first item went up,” Hank said. “Steve and I texted 5,000 times, and I was hitting refresh on our eBay page over and over.” Bidding activity was immediately busy. The group met its fundraising goal by the end of the first night of the 10-day auction. When the auction quickly reached $14,000, doubling Mulberry’s goal, they knew they were onto something huge. “I had friends in parent-teacher meetings bidding on items from their phones,” Hank recalled. He also said that donors posted their auction items on Facebook, which led to a tangible spike in bidding.
The church raised $23,000 on eBay and even more from its community, totaling $45,000, enough to cover their January 2012 trip to help rebuild Haiti. In addition to the duplex, they raised enough money to build a school for the children who survived the earthquake, turning 34 acres of dirt into a productive community.
Stay tuned for a report and pictures from the group’s January 2012 trip to Haiti.
Through eBay Giving Works and eBay for Charity, we are connecting customers in the U.S. and U.K. with the causes they care about by offering convenient and trusted ways to give to favorite nonprofits.
At the close of 2010, eBay sellers and buyers had raised nearly $230 million for U.S. and U.K. nonprofits since the program was launched in 2003. Here's how it works: Sellers can donate a percentage of their items' final sale prices to nonprofits registered with the program. Buyers can purchase these items, identified by a distinctive blue-and-yellow ribbon, or add a minimum $1 donation at checkout to any eBay purchase paid through PayPal.
Nonprofits can sell their own goods on eBay for free to raise funds. All eBay members can make a direct cash donation through PayPal any time, with no obligation to buy or sell.
The power of this program and the eBay community becomes most evident in times of crisis. In the immediate aftermath of the Haiti earthquake in 2010, more than 575,000 eBay community members donated more than $2.1 million in just four weeks.