Greetings, everyone!

I'm back from my Canada trip for a relative's wedding - it involved over 24 hours of solid driving time. It'll take me a day or two to catch up on the email again. I will strive to catch up soon!

With all that driving time, it gave me a lot of time to brainstorm about how we could help with Haiti. There are already plenty of sites that drive people to donate money. If someone wants to donate money, they are bombarded with ads on how to do that.

However, most of our visitors (and most of our editors!) are on extremely tight budgets. They literally can't afford an internet connection - they have to use the free computer at the library. They could never spare $10 no matter how good the cause.

So I was brainstorming ways we can help *them* help out. Our forums are a great catalyst for sharing information, and I realized we could help out in there! If someone knits and already has yarn lying around, we could help them learn how to sell items and use the proceeds for charity. We have a whole site on online auctions, so anyone with "junk" in their house can learn how to sell those items and use the cash for charity. Our cooking sites could help people to set up bake sales for charity. There are all sorts of possibilities!

I'm going to start setting up ads for all these ideas and drive people into our various forum areas. I'll be driving Twitter traffic there too. Definitely set up threads in your forum to encourage people in your topic area to brainstorm ideas!

There are many people out there who want to help in Haiti. They feel sad that their budget situation won't allow them to. We can help them learn valuable skills which right now will help Haiti - and going forward will help our visitors build a stronger financial base!

Lisa Shea, owner
BellaOnline.com

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