Advice for Charities Selling Stamps to Raise Money (Part 1)


Many charities collect stamps as a method of raising funds. The Stamp People buys stamps from many different charities, and we're always looking for more. When we get some new kiloware, we set some aside for later sale, we mix material from different sources to provide the best bulk stam lots that we can, and we sell throughout the US and overseas. So we decided to write this article to give some guidance to charities who want to raise money through stamps.

The first thing to remember is that the more stamps a charity accumulates, the more money will be raised when the stamps are sold to a stamp dealer (we hope it's us!)

Use volunteers to gather the stamps - if a charity has to pay its staff to do this, your fund-raising efforts will suffer by the amount of their salaries.

Following these guidelines are a good way to maximize the money charities can raise through stamps:

1. Leave the stamps on their backing paper (unless you have stamps that have already been soaked off the paper), with a border of paper that's about 1/4 inch to 1/2 inch left around the stamp. Following this guideline should keep your volunteers from cutting into the stamp or its perforations. This is a very important suggestion because stamps that have been damaged this way have very little, if any, value to a stamp dealer or a stamp collector.

2. Don't leave excess paper on the stamps (excess paper is anything that's more than the 1/4 inch to 1/2 inch border or double paper, where both the front and back of the envelope corner are present - just keep the front corner of the envelope and cut the back away). A little excess paper generally won't change what we'll pay, but too much excess paper will cause any stamp dealer to pay less for the stamps.

3. The bigger the box of stamps that you send at one time, the better. Larger quantities will make your stamp dealer-buyer a happy camper.

4. We sometimes receive stamps inside a large box where the stamps inside are themselves inside numerous envelopes, zip-lock bags, old check boxes and other small containers. Taking the stamps out of those "internal" containers takes a stamp dealer a lot of extra time, which in turn will lower the price you'll get for the stamp. The solution is easy - just ask your volunteers to remove the stamps from all those envelopes and containers and then put them into a large box all together.

Part 2 of our advice to charities raising money will be posted tomorrow.