SKIP’s Doors Are Closing
Special Kindness In Packages, Inc (SKIP) began its mission as a small support group in 2004 sending care packages to one person. This organization has since become recognized as one of the nation’s leading care package charities, supporting more than 11,000 deployed service members. There has been a certain amount of irreplaceable pride, honor and joy with every assembled care package throughout the past seven years. These facts alone make it hard to tell you that SKIP has started the process of closing its doors.
After several lengthy discussions by the SKIP board of directors, the decision was officially made. Due to extenuating circumstances, on December 31, 2011 SKIP will end its mission of sending care packages. All supplies and finances will be exhausted. The final chapter however, is all about empowering you, and that will run until December 4, 2013.
We are still accepting supply donations and letters for the care packages through 11:59PM EST on November 13, 2011. The “write to the troops” web form will also be available until then.
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Managing Names and Addresses
12 Dec 2011SKIP was lucky enough to have a board member at the beginning that developed PHP applications. He developed our address management system and I integrateded the front-end web forms. But, not every charity is so lucky and PHP development can be expensive. In this article I'll walk you through the basics of managing the addresses your charity has using spreadsheet software, such as Microsoft Excel. Information to Collect Some charities only collect necessary information to send care packages - name and address. SKIP collected much more than that, to include things like, rank, branch of se...
Read moreCreating Social Buzz
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Read moreEliminate Website Profanity
20 Nov 2011You might be wondering why I decided to include this article under "marketing." Allow me a paragraph to explain. The use of profanity on your website looks unprofessional, is unprofessional and can cause readers to abandon your website all together. What I'm saying is that if you want to market yourself, your charity and your mission in the best light (you always should), then you need to eliminate the use of profanity by you and website visitors. I know what you're thinking, "I can't control what website visitors post as comments." Yes, you can. Every Website Content Management System (C...
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Read moreAdvertising for Your Charity
05 Nov 2011I have a magical solution to keep you from working hard while still raising tons of money for your charity. My magical solution is called advertising. How many infomercials have you seen that pretty much said that same thing? I have the perfect solution to your problem. It works like magic. Yeah, right... but, then the product is demonstrated and you see how it works like magic right before your own eyes. This makes a lot of people interested in the product. Then they throw in a crappy FREE gift if you order within the next 500 years and suddenly some of those people who were interested ...
Read morePrinting Articles
This is what the print buttons look like on each article.
If you’re reading an article and decide you want to keep it for future reference, please feel free to print it. To print the article, it’s suggested that you use the button that looks like the one to the right. Note: the print button on this page does not do anything.
The button output is much nicer than using your browser’s “File, Print” commands. You’ll find the button directly across from the article title. On pages such as About SKIP, FAQ and Contact Us, you won’t find the button.