I often urge nonprofit and advocacy organizations to create mutually beneficial alliances with businesses and, recently, a colleague informed me of a website which appears to provide an ideal way to get started on that path.

The site is www.Gifts-Give.com. There, nonprofits can register and, upon qualification, be eligible for a 10% return on any and all gifts purchased from the site. The site itself maintains a list of potential recipients, so all your constituents need to do is find the items they wish to purchase and then designate your nonprofit as the beneficiary. It seems to be easy to use and the site provides a “How To Use” section as well as a specific means of nominating a nonprofit for inclusion on their list of beneficiaries.

A number of well respected and reputable retailers participate in the site and an impressive list of charitable organizations are involved as well. It is certainly worth investigating.

To make the site work to your maximum benefit, you’ll want to promote your participation once you are on the list. Make sure your core constituency knows about the site and its relationship to your cause using direct mail, e-mail blasts, your newsletter. Alert your Board and volunteers to the benefits they’ll trigger when the use the site; if you serve the public, make sure your clients know about it, too. The greater your marketing effort, the higher the return you may generate.

I suspect that this is one of several such sites and it makes sense for you to investigate all of them to find the best fit for your organization, but at the very least you can start here. Once you’ve gotten a sense of how it works and how to promote it, you’ll be far better equipped to go into your community and develop one-on-one affiliations with stores and merchants in your immediate area.

If you find this, or other sites, useful and beneficial, please take a moment to drop me a line so, together, we can alert the nonprofit world to such marketing opportunities – if you grow a little stronger and can share the ways and means of doing so with others, everybody will benefit.