Thanks guys its great. What charities would you like? I think now having multiple charities is the way to go, that way there is a variety
M'Lop Tapang Is one of the best charities I have seen. They help street children in Cambodia, protect them from pedophilia, drugs and abuse as well as many other things. I spent 2 months with them volunteering and they showed us everything from how they did there accounting to all there activities including bringing me on trips to the slums and playing soccer with the kids. I've seen a lot of charities and M'Lop Tapang out ranks every one of them. They have the lowest administration I have ever seen, 2-3%. They really spend every dollar the best they can and account for everything. They have no foreigners on payroll as compared to some "charities" that give 150k per year salaries to some executives. This is definitely an organization that can take any amount of money and really go a long way with it, what ever the result M'Lop Tapang would be able to make a really big impact with the donation. I just sent them $2K to help pay for 200 kids to go to school, run activities with them and provide some basic medical care for 1 year. I still can't believe they did all that for so little. Whether you donate to M'Lop Tapang or not I will help with your charity. I think you have to come up with a plan of action. Also, if you do include M'Lop Tapang I can offer hosting and programing/code. I have some really good ideas that might be worth implementing for a cause like this. Whatever charities you choose please do your homework on them, ask for financial statements, annual reports and payroll. Just because they have a good cause doesn't mean they actually devote all their resources to it the best they can. By the way, if anyone wants the annual report for M'Lop Tapang please PM me. They also have a video online here: http://video.google.ca/videoplay?docid=5627032757238603404
Thanks for all the great feedback guys. Some of you have really been there which is awesome. If you guys could add me to your msn so we can talk more in detail, or if you don't have MSN, just via PM on how we should go about setting this up. Should charities hand out financial statements happily and without much resistance?
Charities should hand out annual reports without any resistance. I know Canadian charities have to be 100% transparent and there is a government website where you can look at their tax forms, financial statements and how many employees, there salaries and so on.
I love the idea of giving to charity. I was going to donate a portion of all of the earnings from my site to charity, but I ran into some roadblocks. Basically, Google and a lot of the affiliate programs that make up my only source of income don't allow you to say that your earnings go to charity, even if you specifically exclude them from donations. Just something to keep in mind. I'll still probably end up making donations later on once traffic picks up, I just won't be able to advertise it. The Penny Arcade Child's Play charity, St. Jude's hospital, the Make-a-Wish Foundation, and CMN were going to be on a monthly rotation. You should consider giving to those if you can get this off the ground.
Thats a bit of a bugger. Hmm what if you mentioned on the homepage for the charity setup that all the money raised from all sites goes to charity, but don't mention it on the actual homepages of the individual sites?
You could still get busted if Google, et al finds out. Not that I blame them of course. I imagine click fraud would be pretty prevalent in those cases, even though the intentions would be good. You pretty much have to sign up advertisers your self by selling banner impressions, text links, that kind of thing.
I run a pet related community at www.petthoughts.com The site is based on a custom script which might be another idea for your project. Your theme would be different of cause. The site offers every member a free blog, image/video gallery. In your case, you could offer various charity organisations their own space with a blog (for news letters maybe), image gallery and so on where they can promote their charity. AdSense income from the site could be used to keep the site up and running and for promotion. Webmasters on DP could help with the promotion including link-backs to the site. I think it would be a lot easier to run this project from one site rather than a group of sites.
I think I'm going to leave the million dollar year for another year. I still want to go ahead though and raise money for charity. I like the idea of offering charity organisations free space with some ads on the top. Maybe $10,000 in a year ... just start off low I'm considering joining the army or airforce, which means I wouldn't have the time to spend on the computer in order to run a big production. I'm not even sure if I would have access to a computer! I'm uncertain of where I'm heading at this present point in time.
Sorry, that still won't work. A site that donates to charity (or belongs to a charity) would be considered to be providing incentives for clicking on ads. Google and I tossed several emails back and forth about whether or not this was acceptable and I ended up having to give it up. Yahoo takes it one step further: There are other ways to make money, just stick with those.
I would be interested... Buy how about donating for helping people with AIDS? Africa is a poor continent.. So, let's go..
So far, acting under the name OneFace (the .org domain can kindly be used for free). The ads not being able to be used has blown away a heap of my ideas, I will think of some more however. The only major problem I'm having is on the legal side, I am unsure of what legal implications there are (if I would have to register as a non-for-profit business etc.) I want to start by the beginning of next year, all things going well
Personally I think registering as a non-profit is not worth it. Maybe try and have the charity that is being donated to handle all the money or some third party non-profit or something. With the advertisments, you are able to have them on the websites but can't refer to them, using phrases like "These ads are for charity" and so on. If you just say this website is rasing money for charity and is spnsoring a charity then there is no problem with ads. For example, a website could have a banner saying that 10% of the profits from the site go to charity ro something.