

Hacker News: Our Tiny Charity Desperately Needs Your Help - kanebennett
http://adsbycoffee.tumblr.com/post/15938460759/hackernewshelp

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corin_
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.

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kanebennett
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.

~~~
TylerE
You should really re-think your stance on the size. As a website publisher,
anyone wanting to run a non-standard size is going to have to A: pay me for an
exclusive spot, because I can't run any other ads in that slot and B: pay for
my time to write custom code for your ad. Doesn't happen often.

That's all assuming that's a size I can even fit into my design without making
the site look bad. The 250px width is awkward. For us, our right rail is sized
around a 300px wide big box ad, 250 is enough off of that that it's going to
ruin the solid right-side margin we've designed.

~~~
kanebennett
Thanks for the details Tyler! The size is of course flexible, by suggesting
250x100 I was just trying to give a general idea of the small, non-intrusive
style we're requesting. I've updated the post to make this clearer.

~~~
TylerE
Look into the IAB (Internet Advertising Board) standard sizes. You want to
pick one (or more) of those.

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grok2
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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jimrandomh
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>) top charities
list, or to one of the specific charities on it.

~~~
lincolnq
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!

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videoappeal
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_
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.

~~~
videoappeal
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_
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.

~~~
videoappeal
Agreed. But with no transparency it pays to be cynical. In addition,
bootstrapping it by asking HN to commit their time and web space whilst
drawing a salary is a bit of a slap in the face from day 1. Im sure a
consortium of true HN readers could get this off the ground without salary
employees, maybe in six months then it would make sense to appoint salary
positions such as a treasurer and top-notch biz dev person.

------
steve8918
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
Hi Steve,

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

~~~
brudgers
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
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.

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dlf
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.

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

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

~~~
dlf
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.

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shortformblog
Would you guys be open to trying weekly sponsored posts on a Tumblr blog?
(We're over at <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.

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nicksergeant
I'd be willing to donate my only ad spot on Snipt: <http://snipt.net> \-- the
new site is at <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

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alexjflint
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>. If you're looking to do as
much good as you can, then this is where you'd look.

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cbr
"We help the tiny groups, the niche organizations which often make the biggest
practical difference"

Why do you think this?

