The Coca Cola lorry is coming to town and people are getting into the festive spirit which means presents are being bought and secret santa is on its way. Some work places have whip round to buy gifts for the boss, to plan a work a night out and even monies for a charitable cause, mine does all of the above and then some. However someone always has to take control of organising everything from the collecting of monies to the present buying which can be time consuming, awkward with constant reminders and in some cases the cause of arguments. So let me introduce you to Leetchi.com.
Leetchi.com was founded in 2009 by Céline Lazorthes and is described as being 'the leading European service for online group money collection'. Recently launched here in the UK Leetchi.com proposes an easy and convenient way to pool money together into one online money pot to pay for gifts, trips, projects and events. In just a few clicks a you can create a personalised money pot online and invite your friends, family and other groups of people. To ensure people see the fund yoou can email the link to them directly, add it to your social media pages such as Facebook, Twitter and Google+ to ensure you get maximum coverage. As people begin to donate, you can see who has donated x amount of money and you can have notifications to alert you to monies having been sent. What I do like is that Leetchi gives you the ability to thank them at the click of a button.
Some people choose to make their posts public and they appear on the dedicated page which allows people to discover all public money pots created by Leetchi users with the purpose of raising money for charity, nonprofit organisation as well as personal project. The most interesting public money pots are promoted on the homepage (free of charge) to increase their visibility and help collect more funds. Creating a public money pot allows the creators and organisers to explain, further develop and get support for the projects that are close to their heart.
Finally, once the needed money has been raised, Leetchi.com users can spend that money pot as they please: online on partner sites such as Amazon (100% free), ask for a bank transfer (2.9% fee for transfers above £2000 and 4% below) or offer the electronic money pot directly to the beneficiery.
What I like about Leetchi from my own trial is how it is to use. We all know how hard it can be to try and organise surprises for people without wanting to have to put a lot of time and effort into it. For me, it makes getting a pot of money together so much easier than I expected and when it comes to organising a few surprises next year for family members, I have a site which makes group gifting a much easier task.
*this post contains PR samples unless indicated otherwise