Dunkirque Spirit..ideas to help POE

Hi friends, first of all i'd like to apologise to my good lady for keeping her awake most of the night by tossing and turning as I pondered ways of helping POE. You may be aware that this fantastic site is in danger of collapse through lack of funding. I have come up with a few ideas that could help and I hope other members will use this thread to post there own ideas. I think we can put them into 2 catogries, Member driven and 'staff' driven.  Here are a number of my ideas-

Member Driven

1)  On-line auction - this would run on the lines of 'e-bay but poe members would 'donate' an unwanted item, other members would bid for it and the highest bid would go to POE funds. (It would have to be small items though, ie keepsakes, jewelry and the like because of the cost of postage).

2)  on-line Bring & Buy sale, this would work like the Church Hall sales in the Uk. A member would donate an item, the money from the sale would go to POE .

3) A 'world of pebbles' members could gather a small pebble from a river, beach, historic site or place of interest and offer it to other interested members for a small token sum, to be passed to the POE fund. If members worldwide collected these they would have a unique collection of pebbles from all over the world, a piece of England, America, Europe, Italy, Australia, it goes on. lol

4) Amuture Photograpers (Poe members), could approach small shop keepers, publicans, tea rooms of interest in their area and ask them for a small donation to Poe., if they could take an interesting picture of their business ie. shop front. and post it on Poe in the usual way. The interested shop keeper would, out of self interest look at poe,and draw the attention of his customers to the wonderfull Poe site.

POE Staff Driven

1) Sale of a 'certificate' to POE members for a 'small' donation to POE. The certificate could be A4 size, featuring St George or simular and the wording ' This is to certify that ...... is a honerable member of the 'Knights of POE' .......... This could be displayed with pride on the members wall/ office wall etc. as a reminder of England etc.

2) aproaching  sites such as English Heritage, English Tourist boards, local and County councils who wish to promote tourism in their district, for site sponsership or funding grants etc

3) approach wealthy patriotic business people such as Richard Branson, Debra Meeden (?) (from the Tv show Dragons Den, she has business interests in tourism in the West country. Sir Allen Sugar of Tv's Aprhentice fame, the list goes on and you are only asking for sponsership to a very sucessfull site. They could offer help in many ways such as free advice, equiptment, etc

These are a few ideas, some good, some maybe not so goodbut at least they are ideas, I hope other POE members can submit ideas on this thread too?

yet another idea lol

members to 'sign-over' copy-right ownership to poe to allow certain images to be used  by selected greeting card and calender printers, chocolate-box, sweet box and biscuit tin makers in return for site sponsership.

Hi Michael,

We're sorry to hear that you had a restless night over the site! and also your wife, and so firstly our sincere apologies to you both for that!
We do feel really honoured by the fact that you and others care so much about the site though, and its current predicament. Those are some great ideas you've put forward, and hopefully over the next few days we can get some of the ideas coming in put into motion.

The idea of an online auction we really like. In fact Ron came up with the idea of POEbay a couple of days ago, and he's going to kick it off with an item or two donated by Anna and himself (thanks both!) so expect to see that hopefully sometime this weekend (today if possible).

We also love your idea of photographers approaching properties of interest and we think this would really work, especially if the owner got a copy of the photo too, to place within their establishment.

We did email Deborah Meaden several months ago, but were told by one of her representatives that it really wasn't something she'd be interested in right now . We also sent out a letter to a few others but to no avail. Sir Alan Sugar is one we have yet to try..

Please know that we are and have been doing all we can to keep the site online. I'm off now to contact Ron about setting up the auction, and once that is done we will move on to the next idea. Many many thanks again, and thank you to everyone who have put ideas forward and shown their support via emails, donations etc. We'll keep you all posted on how things progress.

Chris & Sarah

Before giving images to publishers of calendars, tourism promotion, day books, cake tins, t shirts,candy wrappers~ obtain their artist/publisher document & then  I suggest a visit to a lawyor.

From my experience in having work ( paintings ) published by an Art House ~  I attended a lawyor with my contract~agreed to cards and prints only...

Eventually, I was asked if I wanted my images printed on t shirts and tote bags...I was the only artist in the stable of 50 to say no.

So, protect your intellectual property because you may find your photo on a billboard advertising something remotely connected to your original intent. The province of Alberta, Canada just got caught using a photo from somewhere in the UK  ( two kids wearing Aran sweaters playing on a beach ) and passing it off as tourism locale.