Responsible Fundraising

Thank you to everyone that followed the link from our weekly email! We at Phoneraiser want to provide you with the best service possible. We think that part of this includes holding promotions and competitions that interest you and improve your fundraising. We are looking for ideas from you, our fundraising community, for new kinds of promotions. Ideally, these promotions would interest you and spur you to act. We want to provide promotions that motivate our partners to collect and send in more phones. This will have two effects. 1. Help you to raise more money. 2. Keep more potentially toxic cell phones out of our landfills. 

Some of the ideas that we have kicked around are:

• A monthly award of a $100 visa gift card to the organization that sends in the most phones.
• Providing coupons (either for an extra percentage or a dollar amount added to their next check) to the organizations that can answer quiz questions provided in our email
• Phoneraiser poster competitions for elementary age students. The best design wins a pizza party for that students class.

If you have an idea for a promotion or you like (or dislike) any of the ideas above, please leave us a comment by clicking on the comment link above.

Lately, a new trend has surfaced in computer design. Green Computing has taken the spotlight as the next big thing in business and consumer computing.

“Green” or “Eco” computing can describe a few different things. The main ideas behind eco/green-computing are making the actual computer out of environmentally friendly materials, designing the computer so that energy use is minimal, and using a green energy source.

Computer companies’ role in this is obviously going to be in the first two area, building a computer out of earth friendly materials (friendly during the build and at end of the computer’s life), and designing the computer so that it uses minimal electricity. Several companies have jumped into the fray by offering a wide range of computers that try to meet one or both of these criteria. Everex (cloudbook, gPC), Asus (eee PC), and OLPC (XO) have all released low power laptops and/or desktops. Dell recently debuted a concept computer that uses 70 percent less power and is built with a bamboo case. It will begin production later this year.

Pet’s tested for industrial chemicals are found to have higher levels of the chemicals than humans.¹ Amazing and a bit scary. Their low stature would seem to be a big cause of this problem. Other than that, it could be possible that their food supplies aren’t policed as well as humans.

If you would like tips on how to keep your pet’s exposure to chemicals at a minimum, visit http://www.petsfortheenvironment.org/takeaction/eddiestips/1.

From Engadget:

The team of scientists has created a white, fluorescent material which can be used to create white light, yet can be molded into a number of shapes….The combo can handle temperatures to 500 degrees Celsius, uses half the power of typical fluorescent lights, and will last longer than white LEDs due to heat resistance.

Cool stuff. Unfortunately, there source is subscription only. Good to see that lighting technology is advancing beyond potentially toxic cfl’s and even LED’s. It would be great if the construction process and composition of this material will is non-toxic (and it makes it out of the development phase).

Source: http://www.engadget.com/2008/04/17/researchers-create-silly-putty-lights-plan-on-making-dollar-bil/