Birthday Party Games Lady Blog

Birthday gifts for kids have been on my mind ever since I ran across the ECHOage website for ‘giftless gifts’ for kids birthday parties. The concept is great: pool the gift funds to buy a really nice, meaningful gifts for the birthday child from all the party guests AND to support an important cause and teach giving.

But for the Birthday Party Games Lady target of kids age 6 to 13, it seems unnecessarily green to deprive them of getting an invitation in the mail. They LOVE getting mail, because they don’t. Also- many kids on the younger end of the age range don’t have email addresses, and getting parents emails can be a pain if your school directory doesn’t include them. When all the bulk mailers stop sending out paper-wasting catalogs you didn’t ask for, then maybe it’s time to take green to this extreme.

And limiting the available charities to those that accept on-line donations, that are dedicated to children and are on the ECHOage list, seems….limiting. A child may better relate and therefore better understand the giving lesson with respect to something more local like the local animal shelter or the school library. A classmate may suffer from an ailment such as juvenile diabetes that all in attendance would feel good about contributing to. The possibilities are endless, not limited.

In these tough economic times, there are also plenty of people for whom a charitable donation isn’t a reasonable option. And in tough times, it’s just good sense to get the most out of the birthday party gift dollars by pooling them to buy something needed, truly useful or truly wanted. This isn’t an option with the ECHOage program, and I think it should be.

So- after many hours setting it up to run smoothly, Birthday Party Games Lady is pleased to announce a new service for pooling money for kids birthday party gifts: the Good Gift Pool Service. It’s available to anyone wanting to set up a gift pool for their birthday child where invitees parents can contribute by credit card, and the proceeds can be used as you see fit. It includes a downloadable printout to slip inside your mailed invitation telling people how to contribute, and if you wish to use some of the gift pool money for a charitable donation, to advise your invitees of your intentions. Your guests’ donations can even be made anonymous (you won’t know who gave what) to relieve any stress that might be felt by your invitees.

Instead of costing 15% to process your pool contributions and send you the money, it costs only 5%- the amount that the credit card processors charge for every transaction. In other words, it doesn’t make any money, it just covers the costs.

It’s easy, it allows you to teach a valuable lesson about giving if that’s appropriate for you, it gives you unlimited donation choices, and it allows you to make the most of the birthday gift dollars contributed to your pool. No more toys or games that your child doesn’t care about and end up being a waste of someone’s money. No more overload with 20 presents to open. And with a charitable donation, a little less “I” in birthday.

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This entry was posted on Monday, July 14th, 2008 at 4:30 pm and is filed under Birthday Party, Birthday Party Ideas, Birthday Party Tips and Tricks. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.