UPDATE : 3 July 2025
Still of 20 minds about selling ads on the becomingBETTER website. Had hoped the time and effort spent building its enterprise level web hub and the 4 that support it would bring clarity to me about whether or not ads are appropriate.
It didn’t.
Will eventually need to discuss this with those mentioned below.
23 Oct 2024
RE: Advertising
Sino, Albert, Walter, Mario, and Daniel :
I’m not at all certain about selling ads on the Becoming Better Together site.
On the one hand, the ad revenue would help fund the project. Which would be a good thing. For I know Jaro and Caritas can’t fund it . And, at over €1,500 to 2,000 in since Sino and I first talked about my conducting some leathercraft training, I’m running out of money that I can divert to the project from my meager pension.
On the other hand, and more importantly, selling ads, especially on the landing page, seems to degrade the whole idea by tacitly implying the project is about making money.
It isn’t.
And we should avoid even tacitly implying that is.
If ads are sold anywhere, it should be on the sub-sites, not the Becoming Better parent site.
I can invest another €200 to 300 in the project; which is about what it will take to launch it with the absolute barest inventory of leather and the supplies needed to make projects. Frankly, we could easily spend a couple of thousand Euro and still not be as well stocked as I’d like us to be.
Now that I know I can – and could have all along – earn money by running my websites without breaking the law, I need to focus on obtaining Estonian e-residency and founding a location-free company.
While starting an Estonian location free company is not all that expensive compared to other options for starting a company, starting one will take most of my merger funds for several months to do it.
Which is why I’ve setup several ways for the project to fund itself. They include :
- Chesed, which is a donations site that will use popular payment gateways like Stripe and PayPal to receive single and/or on-going donations,
- Auctions, which, oddly enough, is an auction site to use as an annual fundraiser,
- jobsBOARD, on which job seekers and employers can pay to place resumes and jobs. It will be focused on jobs for the health care and social service sectors, and be populated via a jobs board affiliate program. And
- jumpSTART, a private crowd funding site that can have multiple campaigns run on it without paying KickStart’s fees.
The problem is, these are all long term ways to raise funds. And we needed the money yesterday, if not sooner.
Ways to raise the initial startup funds relatively quickly would be
- peer-to-peer fundraising via posts to my Facebook groups and those of my friends who also own and run FB groups and are willing to let me do so, announce the project and flat out ask for donations to launch it.
- ask Caritas to fund part of the startup costs via the program(s) Albert and Daniel have mentioned,
- ask the local, regional, and national leaders to ask the Catholic churches they are associated with to take up a special offering as part of their ministry to the homeless this Christmas, and
- ask Rev John Calhoun, the current pastor of the English-Speaking United Methodist Church, to promote it to the other clergy in Vienna, and ask them to take up a special Christmas offering to raise some of the initial funds as part of their ministry to the homeless.
John has already told me he will do what he can to support us once there is something there to support. So, there shouldn’t be a problem asking him to do this … provided the demo site is finished asap. For he will need time to contact his colleagues. Who will need time to get approval for and arrange a special offering.
It is impossible to predict the level of support these fundraising activities would generate. It could be anything from nothing at all, to more than enough have everything we need to launch the program.
Meanwhile, since this demo website is so crucial to raising the funds required to launch the project, Markus and I are pushing ourselves rather hard in an effort to get a decent demo up and running as fast as we possibly can.
Speaking of Markus, he is patiently waiting for me to get back to work with him via Ultra Viewer.
CHEERS!
