What do you think of this idea?

Cromulent

Cromulent

Cromulent

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I'm looking for some feedback on an idea I had. I've been thinking about trying to start a charity / non-profit for some time now and think I have a reasonable idea of what I want to do.

Basically the idea is simple. It works like Google Ads. Charities sign up to advertise themselves for free and business / website owners donate space on their websites so that charities can reach a wider audience without having to pay for adverts. The website owner will be able to choose what types of charities they advertise on their website and the charities will be able to specify what is advertised.

My charity would charge a small fee to the website owners to cover expenses but will attempt to break even.

Basically the website owners donate space on their website rather than money and the charities can reach a larger audience because they don't have to worry about large advertising expenses.

What do you think? Is it worth looking into or should I do something else?
 
There might be something in this, but I have questions:

Why would a website owner give up space and pay a fee?

Can you do it in such a way that the website owner gets tax incentives?

Do charities currently use Google etc? Why would a charity use your app instead?

Have you thought about whether your charity-only ads could be exempt from adblockers? I seem to recall seeing some ethical allow lists.

Can you do something along the lines of effective altruism to advertise charities that have the most impact?

I would have assumed the way you'd make money is getting a cut of donations rather than charging the website owner. Perhaps you can provide options for how the parties want to pay?

What data would you collect for analytics purposes?

How would you identify legit clicks? I.e. not bots and people clicking their own ads.
 
throwaway4372 said:
There might be something in this, but I have questions:

Why would a website owner give up space and pay a fee?

Can you do it in such a way that the website owner gets tax incentives?

Do charities currently use Google etc? Why would a charity use your app instead?

Have you thought about whether your charity-only ads could be exempt from adblockers? I seem to recall seeing some ethical allow lists.

Can you do something along the lines of effective altruism to advertise charities that have the most impact?

I would have assumed the way you'd make money is getting a cut of donations rather than charging the website owner. Perhaps you can provide options for how the parties want to pay?

What data would you collect for analytics purposes?

How would you identify legit clicks? I.e. not bots and people clicking their own ads.
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Thank you very much. Some interesting points.

  • I haven't really thought this through but breaking even could be handled by donations to my charity rather than other charities as that could help more than one charity to promote themselves.
  • I'm not an accountant but from my understanding they could expense the website space as a business expense and then it should tax deductible (having said that I could be completely wrong).
  • Google Ads has a charity grant which gives the charity a monthly Google Ads spend but it might be nice for charities to deal with a platform developed specifically designed for them.
  • That is a good idea. I was going to go with a fully transparent system which would let people ignore the ads if they want or that third party blockers could exempt my system.
  • In terms of measuring charities impact that is a difficult one. The charities I personally support (mental health stuff) have different metrics to other charities. I could look into seeing how much they spend and see how much they get for their money.
  • I covered that in the first bullet point but yes getting donations directly could be an option.
  • I think I would implement analytics in a tiered system. Off, basic and full.
  • That is something I'll have to research more. But there are anti-bot tools out there and of course can manually check any dodgy looking data.
 
I think the biggest struggle would be convincing websites to give up advertising revenue in exchange for a 'charitable donation' tax relief opportunity, unless offering them a way that opportunity could save more than they lose in terms of income (the value of which they'd presumably need to document in some fashion, which could be hard to demonstrate beyond break even).
 
Kenai said:
I think the biggest struggle would be convincing websites to give up advertising revenue in exchange for a 'charitable donation' tax relief opportunity, unless offering them a way that opportunity could save more than they lose in terms of income (the value of which they'd presumably need to document in some fashion, which could be hard to demonstrate beyond break even).
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Thank you. That is a fair point. I guess I was thinking that one of the intangible benefits would be public perception but I can see your point about it being hard to convince them.
 
Cromulent said:
Thank you. That is a fair point. I guess I was thinking that one of the intangible benefits would be public perception but I can see your point about it being hard to convince them.
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Public perception is easy when you do a big novelty cheque to a local charity after a fundraiser event and can plaster it all over your social media, target clients on linkedin etc. but I think that's a much bigger ask for a very general 'we donate some website space to charity ads'
 
Kenai said:
Public perception is easy when you do a big novelty cheque to a local charity after a fundraiser event and can plaster it all over your social media, target clients on linkedin etc. but I think that's a much bigger ask for a very general 'we donate some website space to charity ads'
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I'll have a think. This is a very new idea of mine so I need to sit down and try to figure things out a bit. But very useful point. Thank you.
 
OK. So after thinking about this for a little bit how about letting website owners choose what percentage of free ads versus paid ads are shown? Having paid advertisers would pay for the expenses my charity would incur and would mean that website owners don't have to go all in on charity adverts.

So a website owner could say 10% of all adverts are charities and the remaining 90% would be paid adverts and they would be able to change that any time they want so if they need extra money for a short period of time for instance they could turn off charity ads completely.
 
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