Selling old SPO Boxes

The SPO Door project has been I-ImpactNow's latest - and wildly successful - fundraising effort. This project allowed us to sell old Student Postal Office Box doors to alumni as mementos and keepsakes and for us to contribute profits towards I-ImpactNow's $35,000 goal. Let me run you through how the project began, how we maintain operations of our very own "mini-business" within the organization, and how rapidly it is allowing us to reach our goal!

Step 1: Getting the SPO Box doors

Last year, the Luther College Development Office offered a student group a unique gift for their on-campus humanitarian efforts: Student Postal Office Box doors which had been retired nine years ago. These doors have locks on the front of them, and you can unlock them if you input the correct combination. Not having capitalized on the offering, I-ImpactNow jumped on the opportunity this year and it has shown to be a valuable effort worth the work invested.

What we started off with was a freakin' huge box of SPO Box doors. Huge. There must have been at least 800 doors in there. After hours of tedious and painstaking work (seriously, these metal doors can hurt your hands), we managed to separate many of doors by which range of hundreds they were in. Since Alumni Weekend was fast approaching, we had to move quickly, and we only finished a fraction of them for the weekend. But afterwards, we completed most of them and now have SPO Box doors 1-600. 

So, now that we've got them all neatly organized and matched with the correct codes (phew), what was next? Making them available for purchase through the internet, of course.

Step 2: Selling them online

Kiflu and our very, very, very helpful webmaster for I-ImpactNow.org, Ahmed Alkhalili, worked on achieving this goal. Ahmed is a wiz when it comes to developing on the web (he is the webmaster for the popular Kephart's Music Center in Decorah) and he helped link our 501(c)(3) organizational bank account to our PayPal account, allowing people to make purchases over the internet and for their capital to be directly deposited to I-ImpactNow's bank account. A perfectly seamless operation. 

But after selling them, we have to ship them, too. So here comes the final step of the process.

Step 3: Shipping them out

Now, shipping them out sounds like the easiest step in this entire process. After all, we've managed to attract the attention of our customers and sell them the door already, right? Well, it's not really as simple as it seems. That's a lesson we've learned not only for this initiative, but for others, as well!

When we're ready to send our customers their SPO Box doors, we must gather quite a few elements of their order before even touching the boxes. We must purchase envelopes of variable sizes, determine which customers have expressed preference over a certain number, print off invoices, print off our "Thank You" slips (which we include in the packaging), print off the addresses that we'll post on the package, and print off another copy of the addresses to check off one by one in order to make sure we haven't forgot any. This step is managed largely by our good friend and colleague Wonde Habtamu, and I make sure that everything is being correctly documented and maintained so that we can backtrack to problem points if they occur. It's another task for which there is little room for error and a lot of ways things can go wrong. 

This Friday, we completed our first shipment of boxes where we shipped a total of 22 boxes to 13 different customers. Considering that the operation has only been online for about a month, this is excellent for us! And if you wish to purchase one, don't forget that you can have your very own Luther College SPO Box door by visiting I-ImpactNow.org's SPO Page and buying one!