Designing a Sustainable Greeting Card Donation Model | Mainely Cards
Updated: Sep 9
Creating a donation option for every card in the Mainely Cards catalog required more than good intentions. It required a new way of thinking about design, production, and growth.
Designing a Sustainable Donation Model
With the Mainely Cards launch catalog nearly complete, my attention shifted from designing cards to designing how people would share them. That meant making decisions about pricing, packaging, and purchase options.
One of the biggest decisions was finalizing our "buy one, donate one" purchase option. Every purchase creates two handcrafted greeting cards: one for the customer and one for Wicked Good Cards, a Maine-based 501(c)(3) nonprofit charity that places handmade cards in hospice centers, hospitals, shelters, and other care communities throughout Southern Maine.
The decision carried more weight than most. Michael and I created Mainely Cards as a sustainable funding model for Wicked Good Cards, so the donation option had to be practical for customers, sustainable for the studio, and capable of supporting long-term growth.
The Production Time Challenge
As we prepared for launch, I began tracking how long it actually took to handcraft each greeting card. Until then, I figured each one took about five minutes to build. The data quickly proved otherwise. Even our simplest cards required twenty to thirty minutes to complete, while some of the more intricate designs took nearly an hour. Most fell somewhere in between.
Those numbers changed how I looked at the donation option. Every purchase doubled the production time from the very beginning. What had once felt like a straightforward idea became a much bigger operational question. For the first time, I wasn't sure our original approach could scale alongside the studio we were building.
A Blunt Solution
As I separated each design in the catalog by production time, the idea came: cards with complicated designs would be available for individual purchase only, and less complex cards would include a donation purchase option. It seemed like the best of both worlds. The donation option would continue supporting Wicked Good Cards, and the more time-intensive designs would remain part of the catalog without creating an unsustainable production burden.
Convinced I had solved the problem, I immediately started updating the shop product pages. One by one, I removed the donation option from some of the most time-intensive cards. After half a dozen updates, I stopped. I looked at the stripped-down product pages, and felt unsettled.
From the beginning, the vision has always been to give everyone the opportunity to donate a handcrafted greeting card to Wicked Good Cards. Every product page I changed moved us farther away from that mission. I closed the product pages without making another change.
To solve this problem, I thought I needed a solution that preserved the original vision: giving everyone the opportunity to donate a handcrafted greeting card to Wicked Good Cards. I believed there had to be another way.
Back to the Drawing Board
I started thinking about the Balloons card I recently designed. It was remarkably versatile, and I was playing with the idea of using it as a single donation card. Then it occurred to me -
What if every collection used a single card design for donations?
The idea had potential so I set out to understand why the Balloons card worked as a single donation card before building anything new.
A Closer Look at the Balloons Card
I placed the card in front of me, opened a notebook, and started asking why the Balloons card worked so well as a donation card.
The first thing I asked was whether the Balloons card could represent the entire Celebrate collection. If someone looked at the Balloons card, would they understand what the Celebrate collection was all about? The answer was yes.
The next thing I noticed was the card's universal appeal. It's appropriate for a wide range of ages, backgrounds, and beliefs. A grandparent could send it to a grandchild. A coworker could send it to a colleague. A volunteer could choose it for someone they have never met. Nothing about the artwork limits who can give or receive the card.
I also realized the balloons weren't limited to birthdays. The card could naturally fit a graduation, retirement, promotion, new home, recovery, and many other celebrations.
That got me thinking about color palettes. While designing the Balloons card, I experimented with different papers for the balloons before landing on the no-shed glitter. Those design explorations became some of the first Balloon cards donated to Wicked Good Cards. Those early donations are documented in the Giving Gallery.
Next, I considered the construction of the Balloons card. The balloon strings may look delicate, but they're surprisingly sturdy. They're cut from thick black matte cardstock and secured with professional adhesive. I landed on no-shed glitter paper because it's surprisingly durable, making it ideal for repeated handling.
Finally, my thoughts returned to the production time challenge. A donated card has to remain practical to handcraft as donation volume grows. If a design only works at small volumes, it isn't a sustainable solution. Would the Balloons card still be practical if donation volume increased? Yes. It struck a good balance between craftsmanship and production time, and I could make it consistently as donated card volume grew.
By the time I finished my analysis, I wasn't looking at the Balloons card anymore. I was looking at the characteristics I believed would make a successful donated card. I named it the Wicked Good Design Framework.
Wicked Good Design Framework
 | Collection Fit The design should naturally represent the personality and purpose of its collection. |
 | Universal Appeal The design should feel appropriate for people across a wide range of ages, backgrounds, and beliefs. |
 | Broad Occasion The design should feel appropriate for many different moments, allowing a single card to naturally support a wide variety of messages. |
 | Creative Flexibility The design should remain visually balanced and recognizable across different paper colors, finishes, and material choices. |
 | Durable Construction The design should be durable enough to withstand normal handling while maintaining its dimensional craftsmanship. |
 | Supports Growth The design should remain practical to handcraft consistently as donation volume grows over time. |
Putting the Framework to the Test
With the framework complete, it was time to see whether it actually worked. I returned to the catalog and evaluated each card in every Mainely Cards collection.
Celebrate
The Celebrate collection was the easiest place to start. The Balloons card inspired the framework, so it wasn't surprising it satisfied all six characteristics. It became the Wicked Good Design for the collection.
Just Because
The Just Because collection took the longest to evaluate. A few designs were eliminated quickly because they were tied to a specific message, mood, or theme. Other cards simply didn't capture the collection as a whole.
The Monarch Butterfly was the only design that satisfied five of the six criteria. It fell short on the Creative Flexibility criterion because the design relies on a specific color palette that can't be modified. I briefly considered abandoning the Creative Flexibility criterion, but the more I thought about it, the more I realized it was needed. To be truly wicked good, a design had to be recognizable across different paper colors and materials. That flexibility would allow us to create variety, use materials efficiently, and continue adapting the design as donation volume grew.
The Monarch Butterfly wasn't the answer, but it became the inspiration for a new design. I created a new butterfly design that satisfied the Creative Flexibility criterion while preserving the other five. I named it the Wicked Good Butterfly.
As I worked through each collection, I realized there wasn't a single solution that would work for every product. Some collections needed a Wicked Good Design, and others were better served by keeping every design available or introducing a new product offering. The framework gave me a consistent way to make those decisions without losing sight of the original vision.
From the beginning, the vision had been to give everyone the opportunity to donate a handcrafted greeting card to Wicked Good Cards. Achieving that vision required more than good intentions. The donation option also had to be practical for customers, sustainable for the studio, and capable of supporting long-term growth. The Wicked Good Design Framework made those goals work together.
Hearing from Our Partners
As Wicked Good Cards began building relationships with nonprofit partners, I started having conversations about the greeting cards they actually needed. They told me which types of cards they used most often, which designs worked well for the people they served, and which cards they would be able to put to use.
For the first time, I wasn't making decisions about donated cards based only on what I thought would work. I was hearing directly from the organizations receiving them.
And I learned something important: I was solving the wrong operational challenge.
I had designed an entire system around making Made to Give work across the Mainely Cards catalog. I was focused on production time, scalability, and creating a consistent purchase option. But I had skipped one of the most important steps in product development: understanding what people needed before designing the solution.
Getting It Right
Once I started with what our Wicked Good partners actually needed, the solution became much simpler. I didn't need to create designated donation cards or make the donation purchase option available across the entire Mainely Cards catalog. I needed to make more of the cards our partners could actually use.
The Made to Give purchase option is now available on select Mainely Cards greeting cards based on the needs of Wicked Good Cards and our nonprofit partners. When someone chooses the option, we handcraft a second card of the same design and donate it to Wicked Good Cards.
As the needs of our partners change, the cards included in Made to Give will change with them. That gives us a way to use our production time and materials to create donation inventory we know will be put to wicked good use.
Mainely Yours,
Shannon
