One of the goals of moving to the New Bozone Orgs system was to be able to include sponsorships in a fair, widely distributed way. People and organizations have offered to help support the bozone orgs infrastructure costs over the years; but the costs are small, and it seemed like more of a pain to implement than would be worth it.
A custom built system, however, allows a randomly selected sponsor's message to be included in the footer of each email message that is sent to the group. Each sponsor just gets 1) their name, if they want it 2) a link to s website, if they want it, and 3) a tagline, like Respect the Inbox. if they want it. Sorry, no images or logos.
Here is an explanation of how it works and why I picked this method.
For each or any month, an individual, organization, or business can choose to contribute between $1 and $50. For that month, the total sum of all contributions is calculated, and each sponsor is represented in a proportion equal to the percentage of the total that they contributed. So for example, let's say that for June, Bob contributes $5, Sally contributes $10, and the Koch Brothers contribute $45 (I couldn't resist) Anyway, that would add up to $60 total for June. So for June, one would expect that:
- Bob's message would appear in 5/60, or 8.3% of the emails
- Sally's would appear in 10/60, or 16.6%
- The Koch Brothers' message would appear 75% of the time
I use a random number generator to figure out who wins, so the actual percentages could be a little different -- that's why one would expect is in italics above. This seemed like the simplest, fairest system I could come up with.
What's with the lower $1, and upper $50 limits? I wanted a system whereby anybody could contribute a little bit, but nobody could contribute so much that it squelched out all the others. I could imagine a situation where a single business contributed way more than anyone else, and became dominant in the sponsorship footers; I didn't like this idea. Sure, from one standpoint, it would be easier to have just a few larger sponsors, less transactions, less headache for the list administrator; but frankly, that is just not what we're about with using this list. I would rather have distributed support from lots of people and groups, with a diversity of messages.
To set up sponsorship, you visit this page, or there is a link to become a sponsor in the footer of each page of this website.
So, how does one actually send the money to Bozone Orgs, Inc. Corporate headquarters?
Well, I'm not a corporation, I'm just a guy in Livingston. My name is Jim Earl (username on many platforms is jimurl).
You can send me a check. After you set up a sponsorship, just email me and we will figure it out.
Is this Tax deductible?
Nope, sorry. I'm not fancy enough to be a 501c3. I'm just trying to offset the hosting and infrastructure and some time costs; while maintaining and expanding the high social value that the email provides; in a manner that protects us from large corporate entities.
"Why not set up online credit card transaction processing?"
Hey, good suggestion, I have done that before many times before.
Because, well, it's again more a philosophical choice: We are building Bozone Orgs to be as free from the sniffing nose of Big Data as reasonably possible. By the nature of their services, credit card companies and the intermediaries that process transactions have to be pretty private with our data.
It is likely that I will develop online transaction processing in the future, once I can find that Big Data type sniffing of is not occurring with a particular provider.