Creating Eye Candy for Charity

Chic window displays help organization raise money online

For window shoppers, thrift shops — with their clutter of bedraggled fur coats, wedding dresses on plastic hangers, and cardboard boxes filled with belts — rarely warrant a second glance. But the windows that herald the six thrift stores throughout New York that benefit Housing Works, a charity that serves 17,000 people with HIV or AIDS, have earned many long, covetous looks.

What’s more, the dazzling displays have helped the nonprofit organization raise more than $800,000 through online auctions in the past 17 months.

In the window of Housing Works’ 90th Street location, a turbaned mannequin lies splay-legged — just on the verge of immodesty — on a salmon-colored plush love seat. She sports a white, beaded dress and a pair of pale-pink Calypso heels adorned with feathers and rhinestones, and she cuddles a large, inflatable Chiquita banana. (Opening bid for the love seat: $375. The dress: $20. The banana: $10.) The love seat pops in contrast to the pale teal back wall. And it all blends seamlessly with the other objects for bid in the window: a Cat in the Hat figurine, a blue and brown umbrella, and a sculpted glass coffee table.

Not bad for a display that was assembled in a single day, entirely from random objects donated to the thrift shop. The person responsible for making it happen is Emily Hull Martin, the charity’s full-time visual designer. Every two weeks, she transforms each of the 10 windows in the six Housing Works stores. She replaces each display, with absolutely no idea what she will have to work with, and no plan on how to proceed. The designer has one full-time assistant, one part-time assistant, and basically no budget. (She must phone the charity’s headquarters for permission to buy pints of paint.)

“I do everything from painting the walls to climbing on a ladder, to rewiring a lamp, while trying to design something,” she says. “I have to be very creative.”

The windows that she makes are proving to be a big help to the charity’s budget. Every two weeks, the items in the display are auctioned online.

‘Luxury Thrift’

Raising money through auctions or thrift-shop sales is a long-established tradition for charities. But by adding the power of compelling design to online auctions and the charitable tradition of thrift-shop sales, Housing Works has invented a new way to raise money — a method that has expanded the charity’s pool of donors while deepening and strengthening its relationships with them.

Housing Works’ online auctions would not exist today without the reputation of the charity’s six bricks-and-mortar thrift shops, which, in the 2005 fiscal year, raised more than $8-million, out of the group’s overall revenue of more than $40.8-million. The stores’ concept is “luxury thrift,” says Charles King, chief executive of Housing Works, which was founded in 1990.

“Our whole idea from the beginning was to be a very different kind of thrift store,” he says. “We wanted to attract an upscale market.”

Each store has a merchandising coordinator, whose goal is to create a feeling that is more high-end boutique than dusty, disorganized attic. And like any boutique, “we recognized the role that window merchandising plays in creating a successful store,” says Mr. King. A well-designed window would create excitement, and act as a shopper magnet.

By the late 1990s, it was clear that the plan had worked a little too well. The windows were luring shoppers into the stores — but the trouble was, these shoppers often wanted to buy the items that were on display in the window, says Mr. King. This seems a good problem to have, but if the stores sold the items in their windows piecemeal, a once-compelling window design would slowly degenerate into mishmash.

Since the windows were made up entirely of donated items, they were inherently one-of-a-kind — and thus not easy to replace. And by the same token, “if there was something that a person wanted in the window, there was probably nothing else in the store that could substitute,” says Mr. King.

The idea of auctioning the items in the window was born.

“It was a way of giving people an opportunity to do something about their yearning to make a purchase while it was still unavailable for sale,” says Mr. King. When the store changed the window, then about once a month, the highest bidder would take home his or her item. The auction was run in the store, on a clipboard. Bidders would need to stop by periodically to find out whether they had been outbid.

In 1999, Housing Works hired its first visual director, Matthew Aquilone, who was solely dedicated to designing the windows in all of the stores. (Previously, each store handled its own window design.) “Our main clients are used to shopping at big Madison Avenue shops,” Mr. Aquilone says. “We brought those standards to our windows.”

One indication of the windows’ design quality is Mr. Aquilone’s own career trajectory: He served as visual director until 2003, when he was recruited as visual director for the designer Donna Karan. He now sits on Housing Works’ board.

Making Shopping Easy

The in-store auctions were a success, but even as the Internet-company bubble burst, it became clear that online commerce was here to stay. Mr. King is a self-confessed Luddite, but he frequently shops online for books and CD’s. As he filled his online shopping cart, he started to wonder how Housing Works’ thrift stores could reach out to Web shoppers and attract donors.

The idea made sense, but in practical terms, it created a dilemma that was similar to the one that the organization faced when customers wanted to purchase objects in window displays: Tens of thousands of objects passed through the charity’s stores each week, and each object can have only one buyer. The labor involved with photographing and describing each item to sell it effectively online would be tremendous.

But the auction concept, which worked so well to solve the window-display problem, could also work well in cyberspace, Mr. King realized. Window-display items are auctioned for two weeks — which is a more manageable amount of labor, because it only involves photographing the display items, rather than everything in the store — and it could help increase the charity’s visibility online as well as outside of New York.

Housing Works’ system for presenting its window displays for online sale is integrated into the design process. When Ms. Hull Martin and her assistants are designing their windows, they photograph each item on display. The photographs are uploaded with a description, and the bidding begins. When the window is changed in two weeks, each item is bagged, tagged with the winner’s name, and given to its new owner.

Expanded Visibility

Once it resolved to move its auctions online, Housing Works hired Keith Mancuso, who had just graduated from the Rochester Institute of Technology, to serve as the charity’s Internet coordinator. Mr. Mancuso handles all the technical aspects of the online auctions — including writing the software that has made them possible.

In fall of 2004, Housing Works tested the concept by offering a few items online. By February 2005, all of the items in all the charity’s thrift-shop windows were available for online auction.

Almost immediately, the charity’s pool of donors expanded tremendously. While most of the people who had participated in the paper auctions either lived or worked in the store’s neighborhood, the online auctions started to attract a more geographically diverse group.

Some 25 percent of bidders are from outside of New York, and a growing number of bidders are from outside the country, says Mr. Mancuso.

The greatest concentration of out-of-town bidders is from New York state, New Jersey, or Connecticut, but there are also bidders from other major metropolitan areas, particularly San Francisco and Dallas, he says. “They probably come to visit the city, find the store, and then go back home to bid,” he says.

About half are first-time bidders, and half are repeat customers. The site gets about 2,000 hits a day, and some 20 to 30 bids, “and all of this without any advertising,” Mr. Mancuso notes.

With the broader reach of the Internet, the number of auction participants quadrupled, says Mr. King. Nearly all the items on display are sold.

Not everyone was thrilled with the shift to online auctions, however. “Initially, we got quite a bit of displeasure from our existing folks,” says Mr. King. Some of the charity’s paper bidders weren’t comfortable with computers, and enjoyed coming into the store to bid on their items. To counteract the backlash, a year ago each store began featuring a computer kiosk, with a simple touch screen that would allow a person to bid electronically from the store, with store staff members offering assistance when necessary.

But even if Housing Works lost a bidder or two because it took its auctions online, the benefits outweigh the cost, says Mr. King.

“For us, it has proven to be well worth the investment, because it has given us a whole lot more engagement with our customers,” he says. “Before we started this, trying to collect customers’ e-mail addresses was like pulling teeth. I understand that. I refuse to give out my e-mail address myself, but with the auctions, people eagerly give us their e-mail addresses as they bid on things.”

In an active bid, a customer will receive an e-mail message each time he or she is outbid, which can amount to two or three times a week and more.

“Because we’re communicating with them about stuff they want us to communicate about, we don’t get resentment about spam,” says Mr. King. “It’s a soft-touch kind of access that we didn’t have before, and we can slip in other information,” about the charity’s programs. Indeed, says Mr. Mancuso, last month Housing Works started to ask bidders if they would like to make an additional donation on top of their bid, raising $700 so far.

The charity has also delved into other areas of online fund raising. For example, around the time it started its online auctions, says Mr. Mancuso, it also began selling items from its bookstore cafe in Soho via used-book dealers on the Web, racking up $144,000 in sales in the 2005 fiscal year, out of the bookstore cafe’s overall revenue of $800,000.

This spring, it also began an online giving registry, says Mr. Mancuso, in which donors can “shop” for items needed for Housing Works’ women’s transitional housing in Brooklyn.

“Of course all donations are symbolic as we already purchased all the stuff,” he notes, “but we felt it gives the donor a more concrete idea of how their money helps.”

Future Plans

As the total amount raised from the online auctions approaches the $1-million mark, Housing Works is looking for ways to keep the program growing.

“We have 10,000 registered users of the site, but only 7,000 items available on the site,” says Mr. Mancuso. “We don’t have enough to give everyone even one item.”

The window-display route is maxed out, he notes. There are only so many items that can be artfully displayed, and the auctions need to run for a couple of weeks to give bidders a chance to participate.

And so the auction spinoffs have begun. In May, Housing Works started its first online art auction, offering more than 100 pieces of donated art not available in its stores.

On the first day of bidding, traffic to the site doubled to more than 4,000 hits, says Mr. Mancuso, and the charity had raised more than $2,500 by day’s end. In two weeks, the art auction raised more than $25,000. The event will probably be held yearly, he says, and the charity may hold other themed auctions — jewelry will probably be the focus of the next one.

Virtual Events

Housing Works is also starting to explore the idea of virtual events, says Mr. King.

For example, the charity is opening a new transitional housing program for women with AIDS who are leaving prison. Housing Works has set up a giving registry online, where supporters can purchase furnishings for the program’s housing. When the facility is complete, Housing Works will hold an event there. “It’s not going to be a traditional ticketed event,” says Mr. King. “It’s more a celebration so people can come see what they’ve bought.”

And it’s only the beginning.

“I do believe that the Internet has transformed fund raising in many, many ways, and whether it’s through retail sales or through individual giving or through virtual events,” Mr. King says. “The only way we’re going to find out the full potential of the Internet is to get in there and do it, and some of our ideas are going to be successful and some are going to be a bust. The surface has hardly been scratched in how nonprofits can use the Internet to secure funds.”