This DelCo cause marketing startup is like DealDash for nonprofit fundraising

It’s not too late to take part in #GivingTuesday — yes, really.

Sure, many nonprofits take months to plan spectacular campaigns that will yield thousands of dollars. But there’s an easier way to connect your organization’s name with the online fundraising-palooza, even with only a few days to go.

Bonbids is a Chadds Ford-based cause marketing company that connects merchants with nonprofits to help the former increase brand recognition and the latter earn dollars via third-party bidding. Think DealDash or HappyBidDay, but for fundraising. Here’s how it works:

• Merchants (say, Williams-Sonoma, Whole Foods) donate gift cards to Bonbids, which then lists those gift cards as up for auction on its site.
• Upon registering to bid for those gift cards, site users select a nonprofit they’re simultaneously fundraising for.
• Bonbids auctions go live in half-hour increments on specific days (#GivingTuesday, Valentine’s Day) and whichever user is the last to bid before the time runs out wins that gift card. Each bid also adds a few seconds to the timer.
• Regardless of whether a user wins, 90 percent of their contributions are donated to the nonprofit they’ve selected to represent; 10 percent goes to Bonbids. (So, if you bid $10 to win a gift card, your nonprofit receives $9 and Bonbids gets $1.) Users also receive coupons from the merchant that donated the gift card for which they bid.

Nonprofits can also download the Bonbids banner to display on their own websites. When visitors click the banner, they automatically register to raise money for that nonprofit in that session’s auctions.

For instance, here’s a banner I just made: Click it, and 90 percent of any subsequent bids go to Southern Poverty Law Center.

This coming #GivingTuesday is the first live Bonbids auction day. All of the gift cards currently listed on the site were purchased by Bonbid for the trial, but the idea is in the future they’ll be donated, said the startup’s founder and CEO, Monique Giroux, who worked previously in fundraising consulting.

Most importantly, you #GivingTuesday slackers can get in on the fundraising rush, too.

(P.S. Have a #GivingTuesday campaign in the works? Let us know and we’ll include it in a roundup we’re working on for Monday.)