We often get suggestions and have had a history of taking them on which are counter productive to our mission because it takes more skill, education, or resources to accomplish than it is possible for LongeCity to give to it.
Here are some examples of mistakes we've made and what you can learn from them.
What Probably Won't Work, at least for now:
T shirts and Merch - We mostly lose opportunities to monetize our base with this kind of thing. Making a design isn't a guarantee that someone will buy it, LongeCity is much smaller than say The American Cancer Society. If you want to monetize something like Cafe Press, you have to drive Cafe Press users or users from somewhere other than LongeCity to buy something from Cafe Press, this involves educating NEW people about our mission or reactivating people who haven't been around for a while and giving them something to buy, not sending people to buy a printed T shirt we make $1 off of... We've made about $5 doing this so far, maybe less. We're better off asking people to donate a dollar or sign up for a monthly subscription or membership. By the time there are enough people shopping on Cafe Press who want to buy our T shirt, the designs will ancient. In fact, they are already outdated.
Petitions, Radio Stations, IRC, etc - We've all seen reports of a petition for this or that changing the world, it's very inspiring to see other people succeed. But posting a petition somewhere won't get you anywhere unless you have a plan. Nonprofits that benefit from this sort of thing have a constant commitment and a budget to do so. They update their petition audience daily with entertaining stories and requests for monetary support that coincides with all the latest news with a strategy that is woven tightly into the wider media. If we start a petition, we're basically just handing our supporters over to someone else's mission or exposing them to mission hijackers, or people with alot of skill and determination, not to mention a full time paycheck who join these things to recruit for other people, or salesmen. If someone else is monetizing your volunteers or audience, you(WE) aren't.
Meetups - Are you ready to lead a consistent effort and find a reliable and committed replacement before you leave? Because if you lead people away from us and don't stick to your plan, someone else is there ready to pick up our supporters and make them their own, and it probably isn't someone who shares our mission. Overall, I'd say these efforts have ended in failure. You have to be dedicated, you need a team, a plan, and a contingency plan to keep our supporters ours. If you fail or give up, you're giving away our supporters and many of the people who come to your first meeting will be the ones who walk away with your people when you stop or they'll present interesting and distracting ideas and basically steal the fruits of your labors. How will you prevent this? The most active people, and therefore the most likely to see your group getting its start is someone who is running another group. I'm not sure I even trust meetups anymore. I've yet to see success here and I'm not sure what we're expecting other than to introduce ourselves to more people.
What might work:
Monetizing our community on site - If our users stay here, they pay here.
- Come up with a creative reason as to why our users should give us money for no reward other than our mission.
- Submit an essay sharing your inspiring perspective as to why you support our mission and why people want the future that we're making. Organize something like on our site.
- Come up with an idea that helps us retain, or retain contact with our readers. How can we get people to keep coming back or keep contributing.
- Start a creative project highlighting the ideas of our community members and volunteers. Share and promote their views for our future.
- Collaborate on a study review or research project. Pick a topic and write a study review that LongeCity can share with scientists and scholars that will bring us more traffic. Make some information more approachable to common reader. Help us answer questions. Produce something to make our newsletter a more desireable read.
Edited by YOLF, 28 February 2017 - 08:38 AM.
