Help rebuild Christchurch | Hacker News Reader

Help rebuild Christchurch

99designs.com

62 pointsdhotson14 comments

Thank you 99designs! Very generous.

I live 20km west of Christchurch city and was fortunate to escape largely unaffected. My heart goes out to those that have lost Family, Friends, Homes and Businesses. The last week has been a surreal experience for myself and everyone here.

It is a case of the haves and the have nots at the moment. There are still 20,000 homes without electricity tonight and 30% of the city remains without water and sewer. It's an incredibly weird and helpless feeling with many suburbs getting back to (relative) normality while other suburbs towards the east have been devastated. Everyone is on edge, each aftershock brings back memories of Tuesdays quake and for a split second everyone wonders if it could be another big one.

From my perspective it has been fascinating watching the web and social media play a key role following the disaster. Immediately after the earthquake the news spread fast via twitter as you would expect. Photos and youtube videos of the carnage were being broadcast around the world within minutes. It has been described as one of the most documented disasters in history. You can look back at the first tweets using google realtime search http://goo.gl/40djD

Txt messages and Facebook were the two best ways to immediately check on family and friends, I can't imagine what it would have been like before these services. Knowing that your loved ones are ok within minutes is incredibly relieving. I could instantly inform my friends from all around the world that I was ok with a quick status update. And for those without internet access, their Friends who had made contact could post on that persons wall letting everyone know that they were ok.

Facebook Groups have been a great tool to inform and mobilise various volunteer groups. Canterbury universities student volunteer army is the best example. Thousands of students were mobilsed through facebook and they have been helping to clear silt away from properties. Silt is a fine sand that bubbles out of the ground as a result of liquefaction. http://www.facebook.com/StudentVolunteerArmy

New Zealand developers have also volunteered their support with a number of excellent websites popping up in the days following the quake.

http://www.quakeescape.org.nz http://www.trademe.co.nz/christchurch-earthquake-support http://eq.org.nz http://www.google.com/crisisresponse/christchurch_earthquake...

Also worth mentioning, a group of New Zealand developers have launched http://www.appappeal.co.nz to raise funds. I'm sure your support and tweets would be greatly appreciated.

It's late here, Hopefully I'll do a more comprehensive (and edited) blog post at a later date. Thanks for your support.

Hey guys, I just wanted to let you know that we're doing a fundraiser at 99designs to help those affected by the earthquake in Christchurch.

We'll be donating 100% of our profits from today to the Christchurch Earthquake Appeal.

that's pretty smart of you :)

economics of a fundraising, random numbers but you can scale them up or down easily.

assuming you usually have $10k daily profits, and today you got even only $15k that's still 5.000$ / 50$ (average profit for you on a $500 project or whatever is an average project) = 100 new people that'll try you out. So total cost = $10k with no other costs (a part from fixed ones: hosting & support)

If just half of these 100 people will do another project on average in their lifetime cycle you already have covered your costs and make some good profits (100 / 2 * 500$ = $25k)

Without even counting all the free press! let's say $10 CPM and 200k people reached, that's a nice $2k of bonus

This isn't about that.

A few of the guys on the 99 team are from New Zealand and their friends and family have been affected by this. It's a pretty big deal for us.

For the record, I think what your company is doing is outstanding. It's going to cost an absolute fortune to help rebuild the city and every single last dollar counts. I think you deserve every ounce of publicity you get from this regardless of your motivations for lauching this fundraiser.

I never said and didn't want to imply that is about cash, just that is a nice side effect.

In fact, I called you smart, not "trying to be greedy", I agree it's a win/win/win (well, except for your competitors :)

I don't think this should be down-voted. The guys there probably didn't consider their profits when they put up their pledge but it is worthwhile to consider that they will more than likely profit (eventually) from what at first appears to be pure altruism.

If they'd termed it as 1/365 of gross annual turnover then it would be a different undertaking but without such an analysis this is not clear.

Hmm. You're probably right... still sounds like a win/win/win (if you count the customer that gets their design done and feels good about charity). My wife and I visited Christchurch a little over a year ago. Great town with incredibly friendly people. Glad to see 99designs doing something that will help them.

while i applaud your charity efforts, i want to let all those non-designers understand how design contest driven sites like 99designs hurt the design industry as a whole.

to put it in perspective for programmers, it's like submitting a completed project (or at least a functional beta) with no guarantee of payment. it's up to the client to pick the best "code" and all the others lose their time/money.

for more info on how this is hurting designers: http://www.no-spec.com/

Nobody forces anyone to enter those contents. Get over with it.

i'm only here to educate others on the business model and to stick up for the health of my industry.

I don't think you're educating anyone. It's a free market, what's the problem with buying a Corolla over a BMW? Everyone and their mother (including mine) have a website now. 95% of those people don't need a professional design which is why sites like 99designs work.

i don't feel your analogy works at all. if only 1 out of 20 designers (i'm just guessing at the average number of submitted concepts per contest) are getting paid for their work they are submitting, then 19 are losing out: it's called spec work.

cheap is not spec.

great initiative !

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