My friend and fellow Canadian entrepreneur Austin Hill sent me the following note:
Hi Mike,
I’m working on a project related to my new startup called Gifter.org and I would really appreciate you putting the word out to your friends or on your blog about it. We are going to raise $1 million dollars for charity. If you have friends that you would help us share this with, it would be really appreciated. Especially if you could ask some friends to vote for us on Digg or Netscape, so we can get some more attention for this worthy cause.
In lieu of sending holiday cards this year, we have decided to run a social giving experiment called the Million Dollar Blog Post. You can go the post, and make a wish for the world. We are arranging for $1 to be donated to charity for every wish left in the comments of this post. Feel free to share a few wishes with your friends, family or co-workers, or in your case if you think it would be of interest to your listeners let me know. We would like to collect a million wishes, and a million dollars (for charities). We aren’t sure how long this will take, but given the speed at which ideas spread on the Internet, we are optimistic about our goal.
Just go have a moment of fun and make a wish for the world on us. Project Ojibwe has donated to the following charities so that you could make a wish for the world. (Our next sponsor has another sample here)
If you are interested in sponsoring someone else’s wishes, the instructions on how to do this can be found here. It can be a great way to promote to the world what you care about.
Happy holidays, and I look forward to reading your wishes.
-Austin
I’m headed off to post my wish right now. I hope you will post your wish too.
Copyright © 2000-2007
1:13 pm
[...] From the FreshBooks Blog: [...]
6:16 pm
Mike, am I missing something here on the charity blog post or is this some sort of genius scam disguised as a charity?
While I’m certain Austin has good intentions this scheme is nothing but a play on the get money for nothing idea with a new unique twist.
The site mentions the Million Dollar Webpage several times, where a savvy young man earned 1 million dollars when people bought pixels for $1. http://www.milliondollarhomepage.com/ People took part in a once only web phenomenon and the man walked away with $1 million dollars by doing nothing. By mentioning this site several times it seems he has the idea that he is doing the very same thing. To those who can look past the glossy exterior it seems he indeed is trying to gain money from a charity disguise.
Let me explain how I’m thinking.
It seems innocent enough. Someone makes a wish, and others donate to a charity to “sponsor” that wish. Austin just helped spur $1 of donations to a good cause. Well done. However, the rest of the sponsorship process is where it gets shady.
In the true spirit of giving Austin writes that they don’t even care if the donations are given to their organization or somewhere else ……. as long as Gifter.org is labeled on the receipt as the donator. In other words they want to be able to write off everyone’s donations on their taxes, unless the Canadian tax code is a lot different from the US.
So it is our internet community joining in a common goal as he states, but the goial seems to be profits made from tax write-offs. It never mentions any other real reason of why they need you to write them as the donor, you think the notion of donating the money would be good enough, but obviously that is not the real goal, and they never mention that they are an actual non-profit organization despite the domain name.
In other words, to the unaware it seems great but to me it seems a bit off color in the true intentions. Perhaps you can clarify here or in another blog post. I wanted to voice my opinion without posting public on the blog, so I wrote on here, but I think it deserves more clarification because something just doesn’t seem right in this effort from my viewpoint.
To make an analogy of what he is doing: It would be like people asking questions for your forum, which you allowed other community members to answer if they paid a sponsorship fee for their response. Your stated goal would be to answer all the Freshbook community questions but the real result would be you getting money for the work others did to answer questions. You meet your goal of answering questions, do nothing but host the forum, and get money for it.
Ryan
6:17 pm
As always a fine point Ryan.
Daniel pointed this out as well to me, and I have written Austin a note and I’ll let you know as soon as he gets back to me.
For the record if this adventure raises $1 million for charity and it was just an idea they brought to life, then I can live with them getting a tax write off because $1 million still went in the right direction. I know that may seem a little simple, but the alternative is no money raise for charity…and if they pull this off I imagine they are going to have to do a lot of work (i.e. time and effort) co-ordinating sponsors to cover the wishes.
I should also point out that Austin is a successful serial entrepreneur and his new project (currently in stealth mode) is http://www.project-ojibwe.org/ - a community to be developed around giving and sharing. If I were in my most cynical mood, I’d say this “Gifter” compaign is a PR stunt that will help get the new project off the ground. Again, if it raises one million for charity, I can live with that.
Anyway, I definitely think that raising a flag and pinging Austin is warranted. So again, I’ll be in touch with words from the Austin himself. Thanks for the note.
- Mike
6:18 pm
Here is what Austin said:
I’m happy to clarify. By listing GIFTER.ORG on the donations, we are not looking nor will we ever attempt to claim someone’s tax receipt. The tax receipts are between the sponsor (who the receipt is made out to) and the charity.
In fact if Ryan checks out the sponsors listed so far, many have simply hand written Gifter.org on the receipt before posting it.
Even the notation of Gifter.org along with the charitable donation does not confer the tax receipt to us. It’s simply a notation people are making along with the donation to signify it is part of this social giving project.
Gifter is not a legal entity, and the only charitable receipts we (Project Ojibwe the sponsors of the Gifter project) are claiming are for those donations we made (2,500 wishes = 2500 dollars to 5 charities) get are for those we made directly.
We mention the Million Dollar Home Page as an example of a person benefiting from an internet meme that enriched one person leaving no lasting social value. With the Million dollar blog post, we are asking people to spread an idea that will benefit others. The charities that get the donations, the users who enjoy reading others wishes for the world & making them, and the sponsors who get the positive association with the project and promote the charity they care about. For instance, other sponsors have given to Wikimedia foundation to support Wikipedia and have credited earlier sponsors support of that charity as the inspiration for donating to them.
We hope by documenting which charities and causes people support, by encouraging bloggers and Internet communities to display which causes they feel deserve their support we can create a positive meme that benefits others.
Our team is benefiting from the lessons learned, and relationships made with like minded individuals as we discuss ways to promote this idea. As we’ve stated in the FAQ, we will not be benefiting from any financial gain (no advertising, no money) from this project – and will support it financially as long as we can before asking for volunteers to help us.
Hopefully this clears up Ryan’s concerns. We’ll be looking over the FAQ on the sponsor a wish page to make sure it is clear that we have no financial interest (Charitable Tax Receipts or otherwise) in the million dollars donated.
Thanks,
-Austin
6:19 pm
I’m satisfied by Austins explanation, but there should be big generic disclaimer such as he put in the response on his actual page to say, Hey, I’m not gaining in any way. In fact posting a link to this note for those concerned about his intentions would be great and may actually hasten his bid for $1 million.
The mere fact that none of this good explanation is to be found on the page and that it was mentioned about 10 times to put their name on it is what made it so suspicious. In all reality as long as they got unique donation images they could add the gifter.org themselves, since it all is based on the idea and spirit of donating to a wish. He may want to be careful about not claiming to be an entity at all in this since the .org for most people would assume he actually has an established entity.
A little perspective is all that is needed to see the page in a whole new light though. After reading his explanation and rereading the site, it seem innocent in all respects and makes sense this time, but did not without this viewpoint.
Ryan
7:10 pm
It’s sort of a silly gimmick. People can just donate directly to a charity without giving gifter free advertising. The whole “sponsoring a wish” idea is useless. Instead of wasting space on wishes, why don’t they actually link to charities in need?
Maybe these people have good intentions but there are a lot of people who will take advantage on anything, including charities. Entrepreneurs usually look at how projects can benefit THEM rather than others.
2:22 pm
I’m not sure about this project-ojibwe thing. It looks like they’re “hiring”
people forever, but never doing pretty much anything else.
If they do end up by “recruiting” people, I guess that would have something
to do with that “community building” thing.
White spam is best served cold.