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Hacker News: Our Tiny Charity Desperately Needs Your Help

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Re: Hacker News: Our Tiny Charity Desperately Needs Your Help

#4

You really should add some information about who your team is in an "About Us" page. By conspicuously leaving that information out, I don't trust anything about the website. Unfortunately, in this day and age of scams, you need to legitimize yourself.

Hi Steve,

Absolutely - thanks for your advice, it's something we'll definitely add!

Re: Hacker News: Our Tiny Charity Desperately Needs Your Help

#5
I like the idea of advertising on coffee cups in general, and I think the coffee house crowd is a good target demographic for charities. I'm curious, however, why you chose to operate as a non-profit catering to a niche charity market rather than operate as a for profit that caters to everyone.

As a for-profit, I would think you could have a greater impact with an expanded customer base (= greater awareness) and could subsidize your charitable endeavor with the for profit business. You could perhaps even organize it as an L3C (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L3C).

I'm not trolling. I'm genuinely curious.

Re: Hacker News: Our Tiny Charity Desperately Needs Your Help

#6

Can you clarify non-profit, non-profit nowadays means very little, ICANN is non-profit and is about to fuck up top-top level domains so their CEO can buy a helicopter. Do you draw a salary and how much?

You're not wrong that this is sometimes the case, but definitely worth noting that plenty of the best charities in the world are non-profits with some salaried employees, it doesn't automatically make them evil.

Re: Hacker News: Our Tiny Charity Desperately Needs Your Help

#7
post #5

I like the idea of advertising on coffee cups in general, and I think the coffee house crowd is a good target demographic for charities. I'm curious, however, why you chose to operate as a non-profit catering to a niche charity market rather than operate as a for profit that caters to everyone. As a for-profit, I would think you could have a greater impact with an expanded customer base (= greater awareness) and coul…

Not quite curious enough, they are coffee by name, not by nature.

Re: Hacker News: Our Tiny Charity Desperately Needs Your Help

#8
post #7
post #5

I like the idea of advertising on coffee cups in general, and I think the coffee house crowd is a good target demographic for charities. I'm curious, however, why you chose to operate as a non-profit catering to a niche charity market rather than operate as a for profit that caters to everyone. As a for-profit, I would think you could have a greater impact with an expanded customer base (= greater awareness) and coul…

Not quite curious enough, they are coffee by name, not by nature.

I do love the coffee cup advertising paradigm as an idea though - maybe it's something we'll look into!

Re: Hacker News: Our Tiny Charity Desperately Needs Your Help

#9
Can you give a little more information regarding ad space donations, for example:

- What countries do you need traffic from?

- Do you require "a spot" on a site, or could donors just give X impressions where X is whatever number can fit in around commercial banners?

- I don't think I've ever come across 250x100 adverts before, why this size? And more importantly, why only this size, would you not be interested if people could offer you MPU, Leaderboard or Tower impressions?

edit:

Regarding how you serve adverts, I wouldn't recommend creating your own platform. We've got an in-house system that works well for us, but if we hadn't put such a huge amount of time/money into it, it really wouldn't.

Google offer a free solution for small business with less than 90m pageviews (http://www.google.com/dfp/info/sb/index.html) and might well offer it for higher numbers for non-profits, I'm not sure. Alternatively there are open source off-the-shelf solutions such as OpenX (http://www.openx.com/publisher/open-source-ad-server).

edit 2:

You should also publish who your clients are, to give an idea of what charities you will actually be supporting.

Re: Hacker News: Our Tiny Charity Desperately Needs Your Help

#10
For your third requirement, rather than get a developer to develop an ad serving system (which can get pretty complex), you can simply use the years of experience built into this: http://www.openx.com/publisher/open-source-ad-server -- it's open source and free (AFAIK) for you to use on your own servers.
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