A couple of our Charity clients have mentioned recently that setting up an Amazon Wish List is an excellent way of obtaining products they would otherwise have to raise cash for. The way it works is that you do some hypothetical shopping, and then create and share a link to your Wish List via your website, twitter, email or facebook page. Potential donors can now easily buy you these products – or indeed suggest an alternative source – rather than giving you money.
Many think that this increases the donor’s ‘feelgood factor’ as this allows people to easily identify the difference they have made rather than simply paying into a generic pot. There are of course a huge range of products on Amazon, but Wish Lists also have a feature that allows you do add products to your list from other websites too!
Setting up a Wish List is easy. All you need is an Amazon account in the name of your Charity. Log into this, and on the ‘Your Account’ page, at the bottom under ‘Lists’, you will find the Wish List link. Click on this. Your ‘List Profile’ now appears on the left of the screen. If you click on ‘Show List Profile’ you can now add more text. As your list is publicly viewable you can describe your charity or say why you want these products. Once done, it’s now time to go shopping! Find the products you want and instead of adding items to your shopping basket, you ‘Add to Wishlist’. Install the Wish List Bookmarklet to add products from other websites. You can manage your list from the ‘Your Account’ screen as described above.
All that remains is to publicise the list. Amazon provides some useful tools to do this for you, but you can also just copy and paste the link and use your own imagination!
