October 22, 1998 | Read Time: 1 minute
Charities that want to raise money through an Internet auction — but don’t want to deal with the technology issues involved in pulling off such an event — can take advantage of a new service offered by the popular on-line search tool Yahoo.
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Last month Yahoo created a special page on its World-Wide Web site that allows non-profit groups to display items for auction. There are no auction fees, and the charity gets 100 per cent of the proceeds.
To get an item on the Yahoo site, an organization must provide documentation that it has been granted charity status by the Internal Revenue Service. It must also fill out a form on line with a description of each item to be auctioned and, if possible, a hypertext link to a picture of each item.
The charity may leave the item on the site for up to two weeks. When the auction is over, Yahoo provides the charity with the contact name and phone number of the highest bidder. If the top bidder fails to buy the item, information on the next highest bidder is provided.
So far, the company has not set any rules that limit the number of items that a charity may display.
The charity auction service is so new that only a few things have been sold, among them a pair of tickets to The Rosie O’Donnell Show, which went for $2,200 and benefited Stand for Children, a Washington non-profit group.
For more information, go to Yahoo’s Web site at: http://help.yahoo.com/help/auctions, or send an e-mail to community@yahoo-inc.com.
