[AC] Advertising Fund

[slide]

So, I want to start actually advertising and a few players are very vocal about us advertising as well. The problem though with using our existing donation setup is that we just don't have fast/easy access to that money. So what I would like to do is setup nerd.nu/donate so you can select "General Fund" or "Advertising" and, unless someone else wants to accept the funds, it would come to me and I would use it only for the advertising. Let me know what y'all think or if you know of a better way.

[Mrloud15]

Sorry about not replying sooner. I like the idea and have no issues with it.

[thrawn21]

I agree, we'd just need to figure out what sort of budget is reasonable for the kind of advertising planned. 

[Dumbo52]

I do like the idea that people would have an idea exactly what they're donating to and what their money's being used for. I'm really not sure how players will split their money between the two causes when donating, but as long as it's public how much money we need for each account, people should be figure it out. We should also think about how separate we want to keep these two funds. For example, if we surpass our advertising goal but don't quite reach the goal for our general funds, are we going to leak a little from one into the other, or should we respect that donors donated to a specific fund for a reason and keep the two funds completely disjoint? Whatever we decide, we should try to be as transparent as possible when it comes to money so that people know exactly what their money's going to.

[WickedCoolSteve]

I don't like the idea of having both donation options running at once on the same page. Like Dumbo says, it's entirely possible that the distribution of donation money will be uneven in such a way that does not suit our needs. There is no question that using specified "advertising money" for other general purposes would be unethical. It would be good to raise money for advertising in an account that we can easily access, but if we do so I think it should be (1) not at the same time as when we're specifically soliciting general donations and (2) should either be on a separate page or should have the donate page temporarily altered so that all money clearly is going to advertising.  

[schererererer]

Practicing some more thread necromancy here, but I think we should plot out a few price tiers/goals of online advertising options, publicize that, then run a quick campaign to raise however much money the community is willing to donate specifically for advertising. The object here would be to have a defined volume of cash to use for the purposes of advertising within a reasonable period of time (perhaps a month, or at our next cycle of map resets). This is intrinsically tied to our unknown financial situation, which has hampered our movement on advertising in the past (see [removed])

 

I'd like to:

1. Hopefully find someone with some experience running an advertising campaign; otherwise we'll start simple with ads on /r/minecraft, etc.
2. Either make contact with Nat about the financial situation and make sure he would be responsive enough to pull out the money for this advertising, or set up a new account for this purpose. (I don't know who would be willing to do this).  Deaygo is working with nat to get everything transferred over to his acccount - it should be more straightforward and ethical to wait for finances to be cleared up before asking for donations.
3. Work out appropriate tiered goals for advertisements and then list them on the donations page, which would shift over to advertising allocation only for a bit.
4. Crowdsource ads as chosen.
5. Roll out ads.
6. Analyze population and activity trends before/during/after implementing ads to gauge efficacy.

Ideally we would be able to get the ads out within a month or two, but we will undoubtedly hit some brick walls along the way.

Edited May 13, 2015 by Mrloud15
Editing for finances status

[Mrloud15]

Closing and moving to the archives.