After living states away from my family for years, finding gift giving solutions for all of the birthdays and holidays has become second nature. It always used to involve and old fashioned check in the snail mail, but now we have adopted several different ways to get this done. I have passed my credit card information to my dad and he has collected all of our information for gift cards to my mom, but it still seems difficult. Recently I came across several sites online that are offering group gifting, but only one I have been able to use several times. On giftcards.com there is an option called GroupGift. One person creates the group gift then sends the link to as many people as they want and every can add as much or as little value to the gift as they choose. This was great for a recent wedding, and also used it when I ran the Susan G. Komen Race for the Cure for anyone who sponsored me. It gives you the ability to track the total and tells you how long you need before they cut the group gifting off and sends the gift card. Another great feature is you can add a customized gift card.
I have also started to use this GroupGift feature for Boss’ Day, where my entire office contributed to the cause to get our top leader one of the best gifts ever. It was his retirement and he had for years been saying he would like to get him a nice watch. Well we didn’t want to pick the watch for him because he has great and specific taste, but we wanted to make sure our gift went towards his goal of purchasing the beautiful new watch. We chose the image that went on the card to be artwork drawn up by one of our staff members of a cartoon character looking in a glass case of watches. It was the perfect gift to close his many years of dedication to our company.