Using Craigslist to let people know about your Organization

It’s free. It has a pretty simple name. A basic layout without fancy graphics, movies or pictures. When you visit the site for the first time and look at the home page you won’t be “blown away” in any sense. In fact you may just skip on to something else. But behind that simple home page is one of the most visited sites online.

Craigslist.org draws over 50 million people a month to the site. Those 50 million people produce over 12 billion pageviews per month. It ranks 8th worldwide in page views for English language sites. Long story short - it’s massive, it’s effective and it’s free.

The site is broken down to focus on different communities around the nation. Covering over 550 cities the chances are good that your town, or a small/medium/large city nearby has it’s own spot on Craigslist. There are some main posting sections for each city or town that include Jobs, Housing, Personals, For Sale, and Community.

It’s like a gigantic online version of your local classifieds. But online. And covers hundreds of cities. And millions of people read it.

Now, like anything Craigslist has it’s rules and regs and I encourage you to read them over. For example after reading the partial list of prohibited items you find “Gambling items, including but not limited to lottery tickets, sports trading card ‘grab bags’, raffle tickets, sweepstakes entries or slot machines.” I assume this applies for all areas. You can’t offer your raffle tickets for sale on the site. But that’s okay. You can’t have everything.

What you can do is let people in your area know about your charity or non-profit organization. Let them know what you do and who you help, let them know where you are and what your website is - for free. The more people in your community that know about your organization the better. It’s like getting a big free ad on main street.

Getting the word out on Craigslist is a great way to reach people in your area! Take a look. Read the rules and reg’s to make sure you’re doing the right thing. Overall it’s a great site. You may be pleasantly surprised at Craigslist.org. Thanks!