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Hacker News: Our Tiny Charity Desperately Needs Your Help

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41 pointskanebennett38 comments

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

I'd steer clear of the 250x100 and other odd sizes. Stick with IAB sizes 160x600, 300x250, 728x90, which are the predominate adsizes. You'll be more likely to get into rotation on websites as a default ad with these size.

Also on corn_41 edit2: you're going to hear the word transparency a lot in the digital ad space. Everyone wants it and expects it so the more information you can put out the better.

corn_41, there's a new one! :)

Heh, the 58 minutes ago on the text melds quite nicely with your name. Even though I realized the above poster's mistake, I quickly thought that someone had made a corin_58 to post this =p

dang, apologies!

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.

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.

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!

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.

Yes, both of you are right, but it would still be nice to understand exactly how much of a non-profit they are.

Red flag: you avoided answering the question.

Well that's because I have nothing to do with this charity and I work at a completely unrelated for-profit company...

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

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.

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.

I'd go so far as to argue that I have trouble trusting non-profits that do not pay their staff. If a not for profit wants to compete for good people, they need to pay them a living wage.

U.S. Nonprofit != charity

Indeed, but perception is a powerful thing, a non-profit for charities especially. Microsoft and [insert-evil-company-of-choice] could be non-profit if you soak up any remaining revenue by salary/bonuses. I mean ICANN is non-profit and the CEO already has put a down payment on a learjet from his new $185,000 tld registrar. My point is that they are soliciting free work from HN readers on some illusion of acting like a charity (it might turn out legit and verifiable, who knows) whilst being as transparent as a SOPA.

I was simply giving the short form version.

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!

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?

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.

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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

Why do you think this?

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