Nextdoor is launching a new feature called Sell for Good, allowing users to sell items on the neighborhood-focused social network and donate the proceeds to local nonprofits.
CEO Sarah Friar said that since the pandemic started, conversations about donations have increased 7x on Nextdoor .
“Communities are hurting,” Friar said. “People are looking to go donate, but things like Goodwill and so on are closed.”
At the same time, nonprofits are struggling. Pointing to a recent survey from the Nonprofit Finance Fund, she explained, “A lot of them depend on in-person events — the race that you might do, the book drive they always have, all of that has dried up.”
One way to support those nonprofits is to sell goods (perhaps the very same goods you were planning to give to Goodwill) on Nextdoor’s For Sale and Free section and then donate the money from the sale. In fact, Product Manager Rhett Angold said that users have already been doing this — for example, someone in Berkeley raised thousands of dollars for a local animal shelter by selling homemade masks.
So Sell for Good is designed to make this process as straightforward as possible. Nextdoor has partnered with the PayPal Giving Fund to support nonprofits in different cities, including A Better Chicago, LA Voice, New York Cares, Operation HOPE, Spark, The Hidden Genius Project and ViBe Theater Experience.
Sellers can choose which organization to support, then their sale will be identified as a donation. Once an item has been purchased, the seller can approve the donation and they’ll receive a receipt for their tax-deductible contribution.
And while the feature currently donates the full sale proceeds (minus the “typical PayPal processing fees”), Angold said his team is working on giving sellers the ability to donate a smaller portion as well.
Sell for Good is currently available to all Nextdoor users in the United States.
