Hey, did someone mention my name? But seriously here, if anyone wants a FREE premade fill-in-your-links template to create a custom online referral platform like the ones mentioned above, please LMK via email. I'll start writing a template with complete instructions to complete.

[ 10-28-2003, 10:30 PM: Message edited by: PTA Renegade ]

I actually did a spreadsheet back in June and laid out the percentages of these companies: Schoolpop, SchoolCash, iGive, uPromise, Boxtops and SchoolShare. I'll e-mail it to you, but keep in mind it's a few months old, so you might want to doublecheck it--some percentages may have changed. (If anyone else wants it--I'll send it, but please e-mail me directly; don't ask within the text of this thread.)

We ended up promoting iGive to at least start out the school year, because you can make a lot of money through their referral program (which is scheduled to end on 12/31). After we get people used to the concept, then we'll probably ask them to switch to Boxtops or SchoolCash (or at least to compare the two). iGive has a much broader shopping mall than the other companies, but the percentages are much lower.

Someone else (I think it was PTA Renegade) was also looking into settting up individual merchants' affiliate programs on her school's website, because you do get a highter percentage that way (see www.cj.com -- pay for performance section) . We just don't have the volunteers to be able to work on our website for us to get that going or maintain it. But if you do, it might be another viable option for you.

I hadn't ever heard of those, so I went to their websites. Surprise to me, our school is on one of them. We also use schoolcash.com, and that has seemed to work out okay for the school. (A nice thing about schoolcash is that they now give individual feedback about how much your purchases gave to your school I think every three months.)

From what I saw quickly, some of the merchants I use give better percentages through schoolcash than schoolpop, and the merchants on schoolmall looked like they included different merchants (and didn't include others). I would look at some key merchants that you think your parents would use and compare those.

I don't know about the logistics of these things because the school (not the parent group) set ours up. Does it cost money to belong? We obviously belong to more than one.

(Off topic a little, I personally first go to upromise.com when I shop online; if the merchant is there, I use them. The percentage is less, but the money goes to my daughter's college fund. If they aren't there, I go to schoolcash.)

We are contemplating joining one of these groups to take advantage of online shopping. Does anyone have any opinons of them either way? Or do you know of another one that is good?

As always thanks for the help.