Join RaffstarGreed is Good (for Philanthropy)
Below is an article written several years ago that I thought was very interesting.
Why Profit May Belong in the Charity Business
Aaron Steinberg | October 26, 2006
Before Google went public, founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page informed potential investors that they wouldn’t be seeing all of the company profits. A small percentage of it would be set aside for a charity project to be determined later. Last month, Brin and Page finally revealed what they planned to do with those company funds when they announced the founding of Google.org, a charity operation designed—modestly, humbly—to solve all the world’s problems and provide us all with awesome electric cars besides.
That rich internet entrepreneurs would want to start a charitable organization is about as surprising as Bill Gates’ wardrobe. The corporate form Brin and Page chose for their new charity, however—that was something completely different.
Read the entire article at ReasonOnline »
Tags: Charity, Non-profit, Profit
Jul. 19th, 2009
2:07am
Incredibly well written article. Brin and Page have obviously opened up another door to the future. There can be some wonderful and imaginative possibilities with for profit charities. Thanks for the share!
Jul. 29th, 2009
5:23pm
I don’t know where to put this, so here goes…
As a group, we “players” don’t seem to be very much into advertising this site. Perhaps our own greed is keeping us from seeing that “big ticket” items like the blu-ray player and the x-box would be replaced with similar items soon afteer they are won if we had 50,000 or 100,000, or more members actively playing.
Perhaps you could play into our “greed” by turning into “enlightend self-interest” by finding a way to automatically give a member a couple of extra entries for each new member that joins and gives that member the credit for directing him there.
I know that would be a lot of work, but I think something like it could really expand our little group.
Aug. 03rd, 2009
9:43am
I agree with DarkStar about the entries for referral… another thing I would like is in the ranking (top 10) show how many members have received at least 1 ticket. Like top 10 out of X members.
Aug. 11th, 2009
12:21pm
Well, we know how many members there are from the new “All Member Giveaway” feature, but not how many active members there are (ones who take at least one ticket a week? maybe?). (The Question of whether members become inactive because of seeing others getting upward of 20 tickets a day is a subject for a separate post.) I don’t know why Raffstar doesn’t have more members. It’s easy, quick, and painless to join and to participate.
I heard about Raffster on my TiVo vidcast subscription to Hak5 last year and they even had a prize package up here, but I haven’t seen anything about Raffstar anywhere else for a long time.
I reiterate, we members need an incentive to get more members to cut into our own chance to win… Altruism may not be dead, but greed has a chokehold on it.