30 ms·

Hacker News: Our Tiny Charity Desperately Needs Your Help

41 points by kanebennett 15y ago

steve8918 15y ago
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.
- kanebennett 15y ago
  Hi Steve, Absolutely - thanks for your advice, it's something we'll definitely add!
  - brudgers 15y ago
    The private domain registration is not a good sign for a not for profit. It makes it hard for someone to look up your 990. How about posting a link?
    - fapi1974 15y ago
      Given the fantastic response levels to this I'd hope to see more information about the group, the charities, and more extensive financial disclosure. It's all too easy to claim great utilization rates and great recipients. That said, it seems a very worthy cause and you seem to have picked a good place to promote it.
videoappeal 15y ago
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?
- corin_ 15y ago
  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.
  - wtvanhest 15y ago
    Yes, both of you are right, but it would still be nice to understand exactly how much of a non-profit they are.
  - nodata 15y ago
    Red flag: you avoided answering the question.
    - corin_ 15y ago
      Well that's because I have nothing to do with this charity and I work at a completely unrelated for-profit company...
  - videoappeal 15y ago
    For sure, I hope you dont object I've just registered adsbycappuccino, my idea is to make it a non-profit ad agency that does work for benefit of charities, in my business plan Ive decided to pay myself $120k pa (is yours the same? we can share a coffee and talk) presuming we get that via donations and running some commercial ads in the roration. It should take off as those stupid HN readers will see non-profit and put some rockets behind my startup. Sweet.. :D
    - corin_ 15y ago
      Yeah, that's an example of it being bad, what I'm saying is that a charitee with paid staff isn't automatically evil, it's not so black and white. For example, let's say this charity has a range of options for getting free advert spots on sites for charities. Option A is to have people who care but don't have the experience, and they get X monthly impressions. Option B is to pay someone a low full-time wage, say $30k, and they get Y monthly impressions. Option C is to pay a fantastic salesman $120k/year and he can pull in Z monthly impressions. Until you know the numbers, is option C guaranteed to be bad for the charity? And of course that's just an example of a high salary - my first comment, that you replied to, was talking more about charities like Oxfam, where without any paid staff they just couldn't operate, they're far too big to be run on a 100% volunteer basis. But people they do employ are paid lower-than-typical salaries for their positions, and a large number of their work force are indeed volunteers.
dlf 15y ago
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 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L3C). I'm not trolling. I'm genuinely curious.
- corin_ 15y ago
  Not quite curious enough, they are coffee by name, not by nature.
  - kanebennett 15y ago
    I do love the coffee cup advertising paradigm as an idea though - maybe it's something we'll look into!
    - dlf 15y ago
      Yeah, it's great. It is already being done, but that doesn't mean there's not room for more competition. You could probably outsource the printing and I still think the coffee house crowd is the right demographic for charitable advertisements.
  - dlf 15y ago
    Haha. Yeah I noticed it right after I posted. I did read the entire blog post though before commenting. I didn't realize they did online advertising until after I went to the main website. I guess I was misled by the coffee cup with what looks like an advertisement on the sleeve.
corin_ 15y ago
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 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 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.
- kanebennett 15y ago
  Thanks for your interest! -While we will gladly accept traffic from almost anywhere at the moment, we are restricted to English-speaking audiences. -That isn't an issue at all: we don't require a continuos 'spot' per se, a segment of your monthly traffic would be perfect. -While the size itself is flexible to an extent, we do try to ensure our ads are subtle and non-intrusive, and the 250x100 rectangle is a perfect medium for that. Furthermore, the Leaderboard and Tower formats really aren't suited to the static (no distracting animations) design we utilize.
  - corin_ 15y ago
    I don't know what traffic, if any, I'd be able to donate, but if it was more than 0 then most likely leaderboard and tower impressions are where it would be - MPUs are usually completely sold out. As to non-intrusive, as a general policy it's something I agree on, and we look for in our paid clients (possibly not to the same extent as you, I don't know), but ultimately our sites still fit traditional banner advert sizes. Do the charities not mind about nationality of their audiences? Even if they don't, it often makes a big difference to publishers. For example in my case, US impressions are very different to UK impressions, which are very different to Swedish impressions... etc. edit: I also completely second TylerE's comment, he's absolutely right.
grok2 15y ago
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 http://www.openx.com/publisher/open-source-ad-server -- it's open source and free (AFAIK) for you to use on your own servers.
jimrandomh 15y ago
I like this; if you do it right, it could do an enormous amount of good. That said, I think you should be choosy about which charities you promote; rather than let charities seek you out, you should seek out the very best charities and promote them exclusively. The amount of good-per-dollar varies by multiple orders of magnitude, so the difference in impact between promoting only the best charities and promoting average charities can be enormous. I would suggest directing people to GiveWell's (http://givewell.org http://givewell.org) top charities list, or to one of the specific charities on it.
- lincolnq 15y ago
  Seconded. GiveWell needn't be the only source for estimates, but a mission that strongly promoted cost-effective charities could make a huge difference... It's sometimes hard to convince donors of this case. For many (most?) the goal is not really making a difference, but more like a signaling thing. If your company can turn making a difference into a successful social signal, more power to you!
shortformblog 15y ago
Would you guys be open to trying weekly sponsored posts on a Tumblr blog? (We're over at http://shortformblog.tumblr.com/ http://shortformblog.tumblr.com/) We'd have to talk about it some more to figure out the right way to handle it, but I see it as a way to unobtrusively play with a sponsored posts style (which would work well with Tumblr, where everything is dashboard-oriented) while doing something good with it. I have 20k followers there, so it might be worth trying. Let me know.
cbr 15y ago
"We help the tiny groups, the niche organizations which often make the biggest practical difference" Why do you think this?
nicksergeant 15y ago
I'd be willing to donate my only ad spot on Snipt: http://snipt.net http://snipt.net -- the new site is at http://beta.snipt.net http://beta.snipt.net (still wrapping some stuff up). I don't get a ton of traffic, but somewhere around 1,500 - 2,000 uniques daily. I've never made much money with ads, anyways, and this seems like an awesome cause. Email me to discuss size requirements, etc. nick@nicksergeant.com
alexjflint 15y ago
I would encourage you to try to do the most good that you possibly can by working with the very most effective charities in the world. Millions of charities do good, but very very few do as much good as these: http://www.givewell.org/charities/top-charities http://www.givewell.org/charities/top-charities. If you're looking to do as much good as you can, then this is where you'd look.

41 points by kanebennett 15y ago

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.

kanebennett 15y ago
Hi Steve, Absolutely - thanks for your advice, it's something we'll definitely add!
- brudgers 15y ago
  The private domain registration is not a good sign for a not for profit. It makes it hard for someone to look up your 990. How about posting a link?
  - fapi1974 15y ago
    Given the fantastic response levels to this I'd hope to see more information about the group, the charities, and more extensive financial disclosure. It's all too easy to claim great utilization rates and great recipients. That said, it seems a very worthy cause and you seem to have picked a good place to promote it.

videoappeal 15y ago

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?

corin_ 15y ago
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.
- wtvanhest 15y ago
  Yes, both of you are right, but it would still be nice to understand exactly how much of a non-profit they are.
- nodata 15y ago
  Red flag: you avoided answering the question.
  - corin_ 15y ago
    Well that's because I have nothing to do with this charity and I work at a completely unrelated for-profit company...
- videoappeal 15y ago
  For sure, I hope you dont object I've just registered adsbycappuccino, my idea is to make it a non-profit ad agency that does work for benefit of charities, in my business plan Ive decided to pay myself $120k pa (is yours the same? we can share a coffee and talk) presuming we get that via donations and running some commercial ads in the roration. It should take off as those stupid HN readers will see non-profit and put some rockets behind my startup. Sweet.. :D
  - corin_ 15y ago
    Yeah, that's an example of it being bad, what I'm saying is that a charitee with paid staff isn't automatically evil, it's not so black and white. For example, let's say this charity has a range of options for getting free advert spots on sites for charities. Option A is to have people who care but don't have the experience, and they get X monthly impressions. Option B is to pay someone a low full-time wage, say $30k, and they get Y monthly impressions. Option C is to pay a fantastic salesman $120k/year and he can pull in Z monthly impressions. Until you know the numbers, is option C guaranteed to be bad for the charity? And of course that's just an example of a high salary - my first comment, that you replied to, was talking more about charities like Oxfam, where without any paid staff they just couldn't operate, they're far too big to be run on a 100% volunteer basis. But people they do employ are paid lower-than-typical salaries for their positions, and a large number of their work force are indeed volunteers.

dlf 15y ago

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 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L3C). I'm not trolling. I'm genuinely curious.

corin_ 15y ago
Not quite curious enough, they are coffee by name, not by nature.
- kanebennett 15y ago
  I do love the coffee cup advertising paradigm as an idea though - maybe it's something we'll look into!
  - dlf 15y ago
    Yeah, it's great. It is already being done, but that doesn't mean there's not room for more competition. You could probably outsource the printing and I still think the coffee house crowd is the right demographic for charitable advertisements.
- dlf 15y ago
  Haha. Yeah I noticed it right after I posted. I did read the entire blog post though before commenting. I didn't realize they did online advertising until after I went to the main website. I guess I was misled by the coffee cup with what looks like an advertisement on the sleeve.

corin_ 15y ago

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 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 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.

kanebennett 15y ago
Thanks for your interest! -While we will gladly accept traffic from almost anywhere at the moment, we are restricted to English-speaking audiences. -That isn't an issue at all: we don't require a continuos 'spot' per se, a segment of your monthly traffic would be perfect. -While the size itself is flexible to an extent, we do try to ensure our ads are subtle and non-intrusive, and the 250x100 rectangle is a perfect medium for that. Furthermore, the Leaderboard and Tower formats really aren't suited to the static (no distracting animations) design we utilize.
- corin_ 15y ago
  I don't know what traffic, if any, I'd be able to donate, but if it was more than 0 then most likely leaderboard and tower impressions are where it would be - MPUs are usually completely sold out. As to non-intrusive, as a general policy it's something I agree on, and we look for in our paid clients (possibly not to the same extent as you, I don't know), but ultimately our sites still fit traditional banner advert sizes. Do the charities not mind about nationality of their audiences? Even if they don't, it often makes a big difference to publishers. For example in my case, US impressions are very different to UK impressions, which are very different to Swedish impressions... etc. edit: I also completely second TylerE's comment, he's absolutely right.

grok2 15y ago

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 http://www.openx.com/publisher/open-source-ad-server -- it's open source and free (AFAIK) for you to use on your own servers.

jimrandomh 15y ago

I like this; if you do it right, it could do an enormous amount of good. That said, I think you should be choosy about which charities you promote; rather than let charities seek you out, you should seek out the very best charities and promote them exclusively. The amount of good-per-dollar varies by multiple orders of magnitude, so the difference in impact between promoting only the best charities and promoting average charities can be enormous. I would suggest directing people to GiveWell's (http://givewell.org http://givewell.org) top charities list, or to one of the specific charities on it.

lincolnq 15y ago
Seconded. GiveWell needn't be the only source for estimates, but a mission that strongly promoted cost-effective charities could make a huge difference... It's sometimes hard to convince donors of this case. For many (most?) the goal is not really making a difference, but more like a signaling thing. If your company can turn making a difference into a successful social signal, more power to you!

shortformblog 15y ago

Would you guys be open to trying weekly sponsored posts on a Tumblr blog? (We're over at http://shortformblog.tumblr.com/ http://shortformblog.tumblr.com/) We'd have to talk about it some more to figure out the right way to handle it, but I see it as a way to unobtrusively play with a sponsored posts style (which would work well with Tumblr, where everything is dashboard-oriented) while doing something good with it. I have 20k followers there, so it might be worth trying. Let me know.

cbr 15y ago

"We help the tiny groups, the niche organizations which often make the biggest practical difference" Why do you think this?

nicksergeant 15y ago

I'd be willing to donate my only ad spot on Snipt: http://snipt.net http://snipt.net -- the new site is at http://beta.snipt.net http://beta.snipt.net (still wrapping some stuff up). I don't get a ton of traffic, but somewhere around 1,500 - 2,000 uniques daily. I've never made much money with ads, anyways, and this seems like an awesome cause. Email me to discuss size requirements, etc. nick@nicksergeant.com

alexjflint 15y ago

I would encourage you to try to do the most good that you possibly can by working with the very most effective charities in the world. Millions of charities do good, but very very few do as much good as these: http://www.givewell.org/charities/top-charities http://www.givewell.org/charities/top-charities. If you're looking to do as much good as you can, then this is where you'd look.