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Amazon Smile/Easyfundraising

As prompted by Sandy quite a long time ago I have used Amazon Smile to support CML Support Group. I also use Easyfundundraising.org.uk to generate funds for the Group at no cost to me when I do other shopping on-line. I've had an email today to say that Amazon are going to stop doing smile with effect from 20th February.

It used to be the case that you had to go through Easyfundraising.org.uk to your chosen shopping site to get the donation. They now have a setting where if you go to a site which uses easyfundraising you will automatically get a donation reminder if there is a donation available from the site. The name on Easyfundraising is Chronic Myeloid Leukaemia Support Group.  I'm sure the Group's administrators (of which I am not one) would be grateful if anyone who can used the Easyfundraising route to help replace any funds generated from Amazon Smile. 

Thank you Alastair - 

Though Amazon Prime was not exactly a mega fundraiser for us (and we have a pretty low funding need) we would get £150-200 a year from them which helped.

David.

Thanks Alastair,

I too had the same alert from Smile Amazon... it's a shame really because it is so easy to use and only requires one step set-up to register the charity you want to support. I have used it to buy quite a lot of basic goods that I regularly buy from Amazon for my retail business- bags/gift boxes/tissue paper etc. so over the year it was a small but decent donation for our charity without any effort from me other than to remember to log on to smile-amazon.

Our charity has not had any grants from the relevant Pharma Orgs for many years now (CML is a low priority for them I guess)....although as David says we have very low funding needs these days, so we have not been affected and still remain an independent voice for patients.

We do get a small amount of regular donations from PayPal. 

Thanks again for highlighting this change,

Sandy

 

David, do you have any idea as to how much it would cost to upgrade the discussion forum to allow us to post our individual CML history on our Profile page?  It would certainly be the first step towards improving the forum.  Thanks for any information.  

Buzz

Hi Buzz,

This is something we looked at a while ago, actually. It was a little trickier to do than I expected. However, it’s not something we are likely to do on the forum as it stands because the platform we are running on will be “end of life” in the not too distant future, and we will need to either migrate to the newer version or re-platform it to a different forum system which could offer some more modern features that people may like.

Unfortunately neither of those options are cheap!

David.

 

Hi Buzz, 

as David has already said, we have considered doing this over the years and would love to have been in the position to fund this kind of upgrade. However, we have no current funding from anyone other than our members who choose to donate via amazon smile (about to be discontinued) PayPal etc. as well as individuals and rely on keeping our costs to a minimum. 

Sandy

David & Sandy, thank you both for the information.  Please continue to keep us informed

How much is the upgrade. How much it will cost to move to new platform ?

I'm also curious to know more about what it takes to upgrade. I see this forum was built on Drupal (version 7?), is this right?. Are you thinking of moving to Drupal 10 or using a completely different platform? What are the options?

 

 

Yes, it’s based on Drupal 7 with some custom modules which aren’t directly upgradable to newer versions. So it’s not necessarily a simple upgrade path. 

OpenSocial (which is itself based on Drupal) is potentially a good option for the sort of features we would love to have, but costs are likely to be around £10,000 which is a lot for a small organisation such as this with limited funding.

David.

Thanks David,

I like the site the way it is, by the way.

Best,

Me too - but unfortunately with Drupal 7 soon to be out of support (i.e. no security fixes) it’s not tenable to continue to run it on the current platform as it would put our members personal information at risk.

David.