I have a somewhat unusual fundraising idea, and I'd like people's feedback on this.
I work for a company that develops speech technology solutions (think phones, cars, creepy talking toys). We are currently collecting tons and tons of archived text messages from native speakers of US English. To do that, we invite people to send us the text message archives from their phones. We usually compensate people directly, but I recently had the idea of doing this as a fundraiser for a cause that people in a community can get behind.
So here is the idea: People on this forum donate their text messages. Those can be cleaned up and anonymized before sending so that there are no privacy concerns. For every 1,000 messages, my company donates $10 to an agreed-upon cause, such as aquariums for classrooms, natural habitat preservation, etc. The average person has a lot of texts on their phones, so we could raise money quickly. Whenever we can fund something, we will do it in the name of The Planted Tank community for bragging rights.
We could also make partial donations to the Planted Tank to support the forum we love.
Questions:
1. How does that sound? Would you participate in a fundraiser like this?
2. What aquarium-related causes do you know and think are fund-worthy?
3. Other questions or comments?
Texts are personal messages, so let me make one thing absolutely clear: My company is a very academic, very boring, very established Silicon Valley company. Everyone who donates messages will have a chance to check us out. We are purely interested in the language of text messages, so phone numbers and other personal info will not be collected.
Also, I have not yet received permission from the site owners to actually run this campaign. I am just gauging interest and collecting ideas at this time.
I work for a company that develops speech technology solutions (think phones, cars, creepy talking toys). We are currently collecting tons and tons of archived text messages from native speakers of US English. To do that, we invite people to send us the text message archives from their phones. We usually compensate people directly, but I recently had the idea of doing this as a fundraiser for a cause that people in a community can get behind.
So here is the idea: People on this forum donate their text messages. Those can be cleaned up and anonymized before sending so that there are no privacy concerns. For every 1,000 messages, my company donates $10 to an agreed-upon cause, such as aquariums for classrooms, natural habitat preservation, etc. The average person has a lot of texts on their phones, so we could raise money quickly. Whenever we can fund something, we will do it in the name of The Planted Tank community for bragging rights.
We could also make partial donations to the Planted Tank to support the forum we love.
Questions:
1. How does that sound? Would you participate in a fundraiser like this?
2. What aquarium-related causes do you know and think are fund-worthy?
3. Other questions or comments?
Texts are personal messages, so let me make one thing absolutely clear: My company is a very academic, very boring, very established Silicon Valley company. Everyone who donates messages will have a chance to check us out. We are purely interested in the language of text messages, so phone numbers and other personal info will not be collected.
Also, I have not yet received permission from the site owners to actually run this campaign. I am just gauging interest and collecting ideas at this time.