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Web Success Resides in Cedarburg
CEDARBURG, WI 2003 - FundRaising.Com had been established; Internet helped expand it nationwide
Even though you once swam with the sharks, you can still come back home to be a big fish in a small pond.
Lauralee Oenick, who was raised in Mequon and educated at Yale, came back to Cedarburg after working as an investment banker on Wall Street, in Moscow and as a business developer in London. She returned to Wisconsin to work with a business her parents had started in their home years before.
As the name implies, FundRaising.Com is a fundraising company that does national business while based in Cedarburg. It's a family-run entity that has bravely taken on the behemoths in a market segment that collectively conducts $2 billion dollars a year in business. There are approximately 2,500 companies that sell products in the United States, however Oenick says FundRaising.Com is one of the few that operate nationwide.
Oenick is the vice president of sales and marketing of the company. She says FundRaising.Com is helping change the way people can raise money for their organization, by shipping the merchandise directly to the customer and eliminating half of the work for volunteers involved in a project.
"We help nonprofit groups all around the country raise money," Oenick said. "We help raise money for playground equipment, efforts to make playgrounds safer, athletic group uniforms, cheerleading uniforms, church pews, religious centers and youth missions."
As Oenick sees it, there is an endless array of reasons why people need to raise money in this country.
"What we do is we sell products ranging from lollipops to candy bars," Oenick said. "A lot of the larger fundraising companies don't want to sell just one case of lollipops. We will deal with any size group. I'll deal with cheerleaders any day of the week. They're willing to work hard all of the time."
The company, which was started 13 years ago, employs 40 people. "We moved to Cedarburg four years ago," Oenick said. "We found a fabulous location, with great accessibility for our work force, on Pioneer Road across from Cedarburg Lumber."
The company came out of the congested Web-based boom of the mid-1990s. "We are one of the success stories of the dot-com era," Oenick said. "I tell people we're a real company that utilizes the Web, not just a Web presence. We weren't a start-up company, we were already profitable. It was my father who had the foresight to make our presence known on the Web and he even purchased the domain name, www.fundraising.com, back in 1995."
One of the strengths about fundraising is even during a down market, it can thrive, Oenick said.
"It's essentially a recession-proof business," she said. "We really don't target a particular area; we do mass mailings in California and Texas, among other states, sending out millions of pieces of literature. When we first started the business, I'd come home and help lick stamps. We were grateful when the post office came out with the self-adhesive stamps."
-- Jim Cryns
This story appeared in News Graphic, Cedarburg, WI - August 18, 2003.
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