First Amazon.com Fundraiser Results

Back at the end of December 2010 I launched a last-second effort to turn money from an Amazon.com promotion into a donation to one of my favorite charities, Project Open Hand.  I've just now received the results of that effort in the form of a statement from my distributor, CD Baby: we managed to raise $43.50.  Less than I had hoped, but a lot more than nothing.

I just made a $43.50 donation via P.O.H.'s website; here's as much confirmation as I can offer:

Greetings from Project Open Hand!

Thank you so much for your donation. You should know that your support helps feed over 7,100 people each year. 

In order to save money on postage and paper, please accept this as official acknowledgment of your donation. 

Merchant: Project Open Hand

Order ID: VXJE6E63842B
Order Placed: Friday, March 11, 2011 03:23:03 PM PDT

Amount of Transaction: $43.50
Payment Type: MasterCard

Of course, this was only a first attempt.  Last month I launched BenevolentBeats.org with a cadre of like-minded artists to take advantage of a repeat promotion, and in a couple months we should know the results of that effort.  You can be sure I'll post here (and there) as soon as we find out.

BenevolentBeats.org

I accidentally turned my Amazon promotion idea into a full-fledged website:

Endless thanks to kc! Bradshaw for creating our beautiful banner image in a matter of hours with no advance warning.  True design talent.

I'm really excited to explore the long-term possibilities of a site dedicated to bringing together independent musicians with charitable causes.  If that statement sounds vague, it is. I have some ideas, but I'll get to those after the Amazon promotion wraps and I have little more time to ruminate.

The Amazon MP3 Promotion Is Back!

UPDATE: I've launched a website to support this effort in the short term and similar ideas in the longer term:

http://benevolentbeats.org

Right around Christmas of last year I posted about an idea I'd come up with to redirect Amazon.com promotional funds to Project Open Hand, a non-profit, non-denominational organization that feeds low-income and disabled people in the Bay Area.  Though I'm (still!) waiting to find out exactly how much of a donation we were able to generate (Amazon.com apparently only reports earnings every few months), an identical promotion has just been launched, and I want to jump on it as quickly as possible.

The deal is exactly the same as last time: Amazon.com has published a promo code that gives you $2 worth of free credit to spend in their MP3 store.  If you'll use this free money to buy two tracks from my album, I'll then donate my portion of the proceeds to Project Open Hand.

As I calculated in the previous post, after Amazon.com and my distributor (CD Baby) take their respective cuts, we should be able to donate ~$0.63 per-track sold.  Not a lot on its own, but multiplied by a few hundred people and we're on our way to something significant.

Here are the steps:

1. Click here and enter coupon code VDAYMP3S.  You'll have $2 credited to your account.
2. Purchase any two tracks from my album.  Your free credit will be used automatically.
3. Project Open Hand profits!

The promotion runs through February 14, 2011, at 11:59 p.m. PST.  That gives us just one week to make this happen.

In my follow-up to last-year's initial description of this idea, I made some observations about what I would do differently "next time."  Chief among them was enlisting other artists to broaden the network of friends and fans that might be willing to contribute to the cause.  I'm pleased to announce that a few of my fellow musicians have already signed on to donate their income from Amazon.com MP3 sales during this promotional period.  I'm setting up a basic website as we speak that will link to each of these artists- it should be up by tomorrow (Tuesday).  I'll post info here when it goes live.

As a final note, one of the biggest difficulties in getting an idea like this off the ground is the issue of trust.  While taking part in this endeavor won't cost you anything (we're using Amazon's money!), there is no way for participants to ensure that I won't just run off to Tijuana with the proceeds we generate.  The best I can do is pledge that my intentions are genuine, and promise to you that my desire is ONLY to see a few corporate dollars go toward making a direct and tangible impact on the lives of people in our community.  I'm not in this to profit, nor to promote myself as an artist.

Thank you for your trust.  Now let's get the word out!

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.

Help Me Trick Amazon.com Into Donating To Charity!

Amazon.com is running a promotion through Dec. 26th of this year: enter a code, get $2 to spend in their MP3 store.  They're presumably doing this in an effort to increase their name recognition and better compete with the juggernaut iTunes Music Store.  While I'm sure this will be an effective way for Amazon to bump "sales" during the holiday season, it also presents an interesting opportunity: game the system to redirect a tiny amount of Amazon's promotional budget to charity.

Here's what I'm proposing: use the $2 that Amazon is giving away to buy a track or two from my album, and I pledge to donate all income I receive from that sale to Project Open Hand, a great organization that feeds thousands of people in the Bay Area.

How much money will that end up being?  Here's the breakdown:

Music is sold on the Amazon MP3 store for $0.99 per track.  Amazon takes a cut of ~$0.29 per track sold, passing the remaining $0.70 to the track's distributor, who (potentially) takes their own cut before passing things down the line, finally ending up at the artist.  My distributor (CD Baby) takes a 9% cut of the Amazon payout, meaning that all told, Project Open Hand will get ~$0.63 per track sold.  Not bad for a minute or two of work.

If you want to help me with this scheme:

1. Click here for Amazon's page about this promotion.  It takes 15 seconds to enter the promo code.
2. Once your account has been credited, buy any two tracks from my album.
3. Project Open Hand profits!

If you're having trouble, here's the original slickdeals.net page describing the promotion.

Now, there is certainly quite a bit of faith involved in trusting me to keep my word on this, but for what it's worth I promise to uphold my end of the deal (and I'm an honest person- honest I am).  One might also interpret this whole scheme as an effort to promote myself as an artist, and I'll admit that the idea had occurred to me.  But considering that my album has always been available free (and licensed under the Creative Commons), I hope you'll consider me worthy of being the vehicle for this cause.

I'll post back on the 27th to let everyone know how much income we generated for Project Open Hand.  Thanks for your help!

UPDATE: If you're feeling extra ambitious, you can get an extra $1.29 free from Bing.  More opportunities to feed the hungry.