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About Us
MissionFish helps you support your favorite causes through trading on eBay! Since 2000, we've been providing our technology, tools and support to thousands of organizations and donors, and raised millions of dollars through online auctions. MissionFish is the exclusive charity solution provider for eBay Giving Works, and a service of the Points of Light Foundation.
In 2003, eBay invited us to build a solution that would offer their millions of users an easy way to support favorite causes through trading in the World's Online Marketplace®. The service that MissionFish provides is a safe and easy way to do just that!
Our Name
We hope you like our name. We think it's fun and that it reflects the personalities of our team. But "MissionFish" also means something - it's a combination of two ideas we have about supporting nonprofits.
We think that the organizations doing good should be able to focus more on their missions, and less on keeping their doors open. "Mission" is part of our name because we want everything we do to have a direct impact on the missions of our nonprofits.
We also think that the lack of consistent, unrestricted revenue keeps many nonprofits from building infrastructure that is essential to their success. The "Fish" in our name borrows from an analogy by Share Our Strength founder Bill Shore. Rather than "giving fish" to keep an organization running, or even "teaching them to fish" for themselves, he says that what's needed is to build "fisheries" that can sustain a nonprofit's work in a significant, ongoing way. We believe that MissionFish can be a Fishery - producing unrestricted, consistent revenue for any nonprofit, allowing them to do more good.
Our Mission
MissionFish is creating innovative technology-based solutions that help nonprofits find new, efficient sources of unrestricted funding.
We want to make it possible for any nonprofit of any size to benefit as they best see fit from any donation that anyone wants to give. To achieve that mission, we're providing efficient, easy-to-use tools, and working to change the way that buyers, sellers and nonprofits alike think about philanthropy.
We started MissionFish because our years of nonprofit work lead us to realize a few things:
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There are a lot of good people and companies that support nonprofits, and they have a lot of good stuff to give away.
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Most nonprofits can't use the things that those people and companies want to give away as in-kind gifts.
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Nonprofits don't generally have the time, the people or the infrastructure for dealing with in-kind gifts - even when they can use them.
We launched MissionFish as an independent online auction site in October of 2000, tying those observations into a unique fundraising process that we pioneered. In two and a half years our auction site turned lunch with Arnold Schwarzenegger, an antique bull emasculator and thousands of other donated items into hundreds of thousands of dollars for good causes. We also supplied expertise for online events like Ebids from the Heart for the American Heart Association, the Lunch With A Leader Online Auction for Communities In Schools, and to help companies like Sears, Roebuck and Co., O, The Oprah Winfrey Magazine, and Coors Brewing Company raise money for their favorite organizations.
In 2003 eBay invited us to provide our unique model for supporting good causes to their community of users. As exclusive charity solution provider for eBay Giving Works, we make it possible for eBay users to sell an item in The World's Online Marketplace® and donate some of their proceeds to a favorite nonprofit. Nonprofits can also sell their own goods on eBay, using the proceeds to support their work.
Since Giving Works launched in November 2003, thousands of nonprofits have signed up to participate, and millions of dollars in unrestricted funding have been raised and distributed. MissionFish and Giving Works have been featured in USAToday, The New York Times, CNN Headline News, Wired.com, and Forbes magazine, among many others, and MissionFish has received an award from the Social Enterprise Alliance for our unique business model.
MissionFish began as an energetic for-profit company serving nonprofits, with financial backing from leaders in technology, business and community service: FG II Ventures; The Capital Investors; MRW Capital; James M. Allwin, President of Aetos Capital; Jerry Moss, Chairman of Rondor Music International, and William Siegal. Along the way, we recognized that we could accomplish much more as a nonprofit. So, in the summer of 2002 we became a service of the Points of Light Foundation, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit whose mission is to engage more people more effectively in volunteer community service to help solve serious social problems.
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