Memo From The Secretary Of Myphonevouchers

By Author: Jackie Balasa
Total Articles: 4
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As a president of a charity in Perth we are continually consistently looking for money to support our programmes from government grants and from fundraising efforts. Some fundraising products can be very time consuming, but not My Phone Vouchers. I'm pleased that we found My Phone Vouchers as it must be the most profitable fundraiser that we have ever been involved in and the profits are far above our expectations.

Our members loves discount vouchers and we had a good response from the Entertainment Book® but My Phone Vouchers just takes the Discount concept and improves it. Despite being lower cost for our supporters than the Kidsbiz® MPV is also a single system right across Australian with more than 3000 businesses involved, which means that our supporters can always find a discount voucher around them at home or when they travel for business or fun. When My Phone Vouchers says local they don't mean any particular location but wherever the user happens to be and the area around them. The "Local area" is simply how far a member is willing to travel from where they currently are where that may be. The next improvement ...
... is subtle but also profound. Some businesses offer a smaller discount but makes them available more often. So rather than the offer being "One Free Coffee" the offer might be "Two Coffees for the Price of One" so in effect the discount is the same value ($4 for the coffee) but the first is 100% discount (Free) and the second one is 50% (two for one). But in MPV the lower discount voucher value is generally made available daily, weekly or monthly. This means that instead of a single voucher worth four dollars there may be up to 365 vouchers worth four dollars. If MPV printed a physical voucher book the number of available discount vouchers when this is taken into account, the numbers are amazing, more than 52,000 discounts available for the MPV members. MPV, they also tell us that at 80GSM (the thickness of normal paper) that to print a book of vouchers would be more than three metres thick. It's no wonder that other solution have to limit the number of discount coupons available.

So how does it work for us? Well we simply email, tweet, facebook message to let our members know of our fundraiser and what the funds would be used for and ask them to purchase a My Phone Vouchers membership via the MPV website and nominate us as their supported group. More than 90% the funds come with no further action. MPV then handles the whole thing and we get a cheque at the end of the month. (They send us and email and we invoice them that they pay promptly) The only complication we got was that some people didn't have a credit card to do the transaction or was uneasy about putting their card details into the web site. After discussing this with the technical people at a MPV. As a supported group we can add MPV members, our members, our supporters directly to the MyPhoneVouchers system via the website and we charge the $39.95 to our member (usually in foldies) and then send 19.95 to MyPhoneVouchers.com by the end of the month. We have never actually sent them money as they just took it out of what they owed us and sent us the balance. The second part was also easy to overcome. My Phone Vouchers uses a very well respected organisation to process their credit card transactions and in fact one of the only credit card facilities that are recommended by all Australian Banks. MPV does not store the credit card details and once it is approved only a reference number given by the credit card processing facility is stored. The whole attitude of My Phone Vouchers is interesting too, they are really interested in help us raise funds and it seems to be their primary concern.

The biggest comment that we get from our supporters is that "it's so convenient". When you use the entertainment book® you have plan where to go and ensure you have the book etc. With MyPhoneVouchers if you have your phone with you and who doesn't you can be out and about and think "gee a coffee would be nice" but first you don't know where to get one and secondly with My Phone Vouchers you are going to get a discount.

We can't wait until next year when our supporters re-sign and we get paid again. We get access to the database of our members so we will give a little gentle promptingbut that's what fundraising is all about.

For more information be sure to look at our web site by visiting this link - MyPhoneVouchers.