Amazon Scheme Reflection, Pt. 1

Amazon.com's MP3 promotion has come to a close, and so necessarily has my scheme to take advantage of their pile 'o cash to fund a Project Open Hand donation.  Unfortunately, it could be a while before we find out exactly how much of the money pit we managed to redirect: it turns out that none of the major online music stores (Amazon included) report earnings immediately- in fact, they can take up to three months (!) to get back to artists with income reports.  Having given away my album for free since day one, this was news to me.

The one metric that I do have is that this blog had 153 unique visitors between the time I made the initial post and the time the promotion ended.  Based on that number, and given an expected net donation of ~$1.25 per participant (see my previous post for an explanation of how I calculated this number), I'm hopeful that we'll be able to donate at least $100 when all is said and done.  That's enough to feed three people for a week- not insignificant by any means.

In my heart of hearts I'd hoped that the scheme would go viral and we'd be able to generate an order of magnitude more income than that real-world estimate, but it's likely not to be.  Turns out it's a lot harder to spread the word about something like this than I thought.  The major difficulties as I see them were:

1. The holidays.  Amazon's promotion (and consequently the scheme) happened to fall on a couple of days before and one day after Christmas.  It's debatable whether this ought to have made spreading the word easier or harder, but I suspect it was the latter (see (3) below).
2. I stood to benefit.  Unfortunately, the only way to convert Amazon's restricted "free money" into USD fit for donation was to channel it through tracks from my album in their MP3 store.  This meant that my music would move up the sales charts and presumably make it into the hands of new listeners that wouldn't have otherwise heard it (albeit at no cost to them).  The fact that I stood to benefit from what I was trying to frame as a purely philanthropic gesture probably prevented some people from being comfortable participating, particularly those that didn't know me personally.  Since this was the core of the scheme, though, there wasn't much I could do about it other than find a better and more convincing way to explain my intentions.
3. I waited too long to / didn't successfully publicize.  At first I thought that a few posts to my personal and band Facebook pages would be enough to get the ball rolling.  It wasn't until the second day (halfway through the promotion) that I thought of actively contacting blogs and other organizations with info about what I was trying to do.  Unfortunately, none of the sites that I contacted ended up passing the story along, likely in large part due to (1) and (2).  If I had to do it all over again, I would have jumped on the publicity train from minute one.

I'm guessing that this is not going to be the last promotion of it's kind.  Based on my experiences this time around, I think that the best approach to take next time would be to build a coalition of artists that all pledge to donate income from sales to charity.  I think this would go a long way towards solving problem (2), and would multiply the "publicity power" of the group as a whole, potentially ameliorating (3).  I'm in the early stages of planning just such a coalition so that we'll be prepared to hit the ground running next time a giant corporation offers free money as part of a promotion.  Get in touch if you're interested in helping out.

Overall, I know that we'll be able to make a donation to Project Open Hand, and regardless of how much it ends up being, there's no doubt that it will help feed more people than had we done nothing.  Many thanks to everyone that trusted me enough to participate!  I'll post final results as soon as I get them.