Community Admin Guide for nonprofits and community organizations
How to launch and run your organization's marketplace: the setup, the posts to copy into your group, and what to do each week. About fifteen minutes to get started.
Set up your community
Fifteen minutes, once, free. Easiest on a laptop.
Tell your providers first
You already know who they are: your board members, your volunteers, and the supporters who already lend you things for events. You have seen their names a hundred times.
Message them before you announce, not to keep it quiet, but because they are what makes the announcement land. When everybody shows up and there are already thirty things listed, it looks like something real.
Hey [NAME], I am setting something up for the group and I want you on it first.
People ask about your sound system constantly. Now you can put it up with your price and your rules, and people book and pay right there instead of DMing you and paying you whenever they get around to it. Deposit handled, photos of the condition handled, no chasing anybody for cash.
You get the customers, and 10% goes to the campaign.
Grab the app or just use the website, whichever you like. Fifteen minutes to put your first one up. I am announcing on [DAY], so post your link then.
[YOUR LINK]
Tell them to use a real photo of the actual thing, a clear price, and one line on what they will and will not do. A phone photo of the real item beats a stock image every time.
Announce it
New for the group, and honestly I do not know why this did not exist already.
Your supporters already own everything you keep renting from a vendor. Meanwhile somebody else here needed that exact thing last month and went and bought their own.
We now have a page where we can rent our stuff to each other. Tables, chairs, and canopies, Sound systems and projectors, Coolers and serving equipment, whatever you have. Services too, so if you do photographers and videographers or anything else, put yourself up. And if you want to sell things, you can set up a page for that and share your link here.
Everything is handled on it. Payment, deposits, and photos of the condition before and after, so nobody is arguing over a scratch or chasing somebody for cash.
Get the app if you want it on your phone, or just use the website, no download needed. Either works.
10% of everything that goes through it goes to the campaign.
[YOUR LINK]
Then give the link a permanent home. It works wherever your group already talks, so put it in two or three of these rather than reposting it:
Rentals, sales, and services go through our Kofa page. Payment, deposits, and condition photos are handled there, so both sides are covered, and 10% goes to the campaign. App or website, either works. Link is pinned above.
“Why not just deal with each other directly?”
Somebody asks this in the first week, every time. Answer it in public, properly, once, then point back to it.
You can, and for small stuff between people who already know each other, go for it.
The reason to use the page is what happens when it does not go smoothly. The money is held instead of sent to somebody you met in a comment thread. There are photos of the condition before it left and after it came back, so a damage argument has an actual answer instead of two people's word against each other. There is a deposit. And if something really goes wrong, there is somebody to go to.
The other reason is that 10% of every booking goes to the campaign. Every time you book on the page instead of in the DMs, you are putting money toward it. Dealing direct is fine. This just also does something for everybody else.
Two things, once a week
A few details
Listings, not signups.
Not members. Not accounts. Live listings with real photos. Everything else follows from it. If listings stall, the fix is always the same: go back to the people in your group who have things, and get them to post.
You are not building a new platform. You are giving your group a way to do what it was already doing, and getting paid for running it.
This guide is written for nonprofits and community organizations. For the full picture of how community marketplaces work on Kofa, see Kofa for Communities, or browse what people near you are renting.