The one that was referred to me seems to be sort of a brokerage/consolidator service. That’s not the right term, but basically they do all the management of the program, keep a small cut of the revenue and forward the rest to my charity. They have a call center, work with local tow operators to get the vehicles, do the paperwork with the donor, and simply send us a check. Its this one if anyone wants to take a look and point out any red flags: http://www.donatingiseasy.org/
I think the very few testimonials on the site are vague, so that’s a bit of a red flag. But the rest seems fine.
We’re really small, though, so even if we only get $50/vehicle that’s welcome, if it really is that hands-off for us. We don’t have the people to organize and run something like this.
Donated a car that had basically died in the middle of an intersection. It was repairable but to do so would have cost more than it was worth.
A few weeks later, we received notice that it had been impounded. The new owners hadn’t bothered to change the title nor registration. We sent notice of the donation to the impound yard’s jurisdiction and that was that.
I still wonder if we could have retrieved it from the impound instead. Some time between donating and the notice, we discovered that we still had a copy of the keys.
Most states have some paperwork you can file when you get rid of a car to say that you no longer own it. The new owner is supposed to file the paperwork to register the car to them, but they don’t always do that. If you file the transfer paperwork, then the state knows you don’t own the car regardless of what the new owner does.
About 8 years ago, the animal rescue group I volunteered for signed up with an agency that gave us money for donated vehicles. We got a set amount for each vehicle, no matter how drivable it was. (As I recall, it was $100 each. Maybe it was a little more because we could get 4 female cats fixed with the money.)
The way it worked was that someone could call to donate in our name and the agency would send out a tow truck to get the vehicle and title.
At first it was a dismal failure because our target audience didn’t know about it. People with broken down junkers often don’t think about animal rescue groups, so don’t look online to see if such vehicles would be helpful. Our rescue group didn’t have the money to advertise in the media.
Finally, the director decided that we should get the word out personally. I was the official beggar for the group. I have absolutely no problem asking people for donations for my cause, so on the weekends I would get a male friend to go with me and drive around residential areas looking for cars that were on blocks or had grass and weeds growing around them.
I’d leave the male friend in the car, go knock on the door and ask them for their car for charity. Sometimes the person would be offended, so I would apologize for bothering them and leave.
Many times, they were happy to have the problem go away and I would leave with the title so they wouldn’t have to be available to deal with the tow truck driver.
We made a nice amount of money this way, but it did cost my friend and I a lot of our limited free time.
Should you think that my method would be a good idea, please be sure that the person doing the door knocking always has back up in the car. She should never go into the house. She should be dressed respectably and wearing your group’s t-shirt or something with cute animals on the front. She should wear shoes that she can run in. She should leave her purse in the car and have the donation forms and her rescue group cards in her hand. She should do this in the mid-morning, late enough that she doesn’t wake people up but early enough that they haven’t started drinking. (not everyone with junkers on blocks drinks but a surprising number of people do start drinking fairly early in the day on weekends.)
I donated a '94 Ford Tempo to the Kidney Foundation.
The car had a zillion miles on it and tons of stuff that needed to be repaired. The brakes were ala Fred Flintstones feet!:eek:
The tax write off I got was far more than I would have gotten had I sold it. A few months later I saw a guy driving it. I was able to catch up to him and talk to him. Turns out he owned an auto shop. He bought the car from the foundation and fixed it up on his own wholesale cost.
I got rid of a car I didn’t want, got a nice tax write off, got to help an organization I deeply believe in, they got some money for the car, and the guy got a car for cheap and a project to work on.
