Topic: Bitcoin 100: Developed Specifically for Non-Profits - page 85. (Read 262769 times)

I'm formally requesting honest criticism and opinions of the effectiveness of the following letter. Pretend, if you will, that you just received such a letter. Does it do it's job well in calling for a course of action, or would you simply file or delete it? Would you past it on to upper management? Feel free to criticize as strongly as possible. I have thick skin.

Consider quoting the letter and highlighting your concerns (and short comments within the letter) in red, as did in the example below.

~Bruno~

The following is written in E-Prime. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-Prime

I see now I was mispelling verbiage as well.    Once things quiet down a bit at my house, this evening I will pop up a final draft and hopefully get our first one sent out for Christmas.

  Cheers,
    Derek

I, too, am looking for suggestions as to verbiage of my rewrite. I feel that although not perfect, it engages the reader, hopefully to further warrant a response, which is the hope here. I wanted the letter to be as personal as possible, but not come across as corny, poorly written or, surely not in a do-this-or-else tone. I hoped my letter reached that objective, but if it misses that mark somehow please, anybody, improve upon it.

I need to state that this is not a contest as to which letter is better, for mine was all based upon Derek's hard efforts. I also feel that we both have the same level of the English language, albeit limited, hence asking for help from this fine community where better wordsmiths lurk. evoorhees and Matthew come to mine, among the others who've already kindly put in input the last 24 hours.


I think we're leaning toward one at time, with St. Jude only being a suggestion. This aspect is definitely open for discussion, though no harm done, I believe, if one is sent out prior to a consensus.


This information will be available on the website at bitcoin100.org with links, write-ups, etc.


I like how this is coming together. Grab a position and run with it. Derek takes care of all the initial email contacts. Thank you, Derek, for taking control of this aspect as well as all your hard effort, to date. From an outside, it may look simple, but at our end, it's a challenge. A challenge we accept open-heartedly.

~Bruno~

Thank you kindly, istar, for becoming a supporter of Bitcoin100. You have been added to the list. I see that your questions has been answered fully with the following quote:


Thank you, mcorlett, for providing that answer to istar.

Only 5 more users need to pledge (not donate) to bring the list up to 100 supporters. This would make a fine Christmas gift to the Bitcoin community if we can make this happen.

~Bruno~

Thank you, Technomage, Bruno and Istar for your valuable additions. Not sure how that period snuck in there on me. As long as we all agree on the template and its order of information and prose, then I will polish it up for grammar and verbage before submitting it to each charity.

@Technomage Thanks, I wrestled with that a bit but feel my mother, an English major would probably agree. Though she would likely also grimace over not sending the more elegant letter that was the first draft. ;p I was absolutly horrible at 'American English', though I excelled at most everything else. I always felt the writer should have the freedom to captivate the audiences' emotions with his grammar. Sadly the teachers did not agree and I could not wrap my head around the 'properness' of modern english. cheers

@Bruno Thank you for adjusting the verbage to flow better. I will take into consideration and add in some of your suggestions as I am polishing.

@Istar Thank you for pointing that out. While I would like to think anyone who bothered to add the Bitcoin option would just leave it in place, as it costs them little to no extra manpower to do so. You have a very valid point. I likely would not go as far as stating a stipulation in our approach that they were obligated to keep it there. I feel we should discuss how best to follow up with the ones that have accepted bitcoins. Coming back to them after some period of time may be one option. It will also be prudent of us to make sure that any organization that does accept bitcoins is added to the wiki and that we make a thread here to list the charities that accept bitcoins. Between the wiki and forum thread it will be benefecial to the charity in the extra traffic it will generate to their causes.

 Questions;  
Should we aim to send out to our letter to the first 10 charities on our list all at once or should we send one at a time and give each charity some small amount of time to respond before moving on to the next one?
If we decide to send it to one at a time should St. Jude be our first contact?  

Note; Please forgive me if I am slow to respond. We are hosting dinner at my house this afternoon and tommorow is Christmas. I don't intend to be too far form my office here, but don't want anyone to feel I am ignoring them or went missing.

  Merry Christmas,
    Derek

Looks like there was a mix-up and the donator gave his consent to have the funds moved.

But we need to think longterm.

We dont want an organisation to put up an adress, we send them our coins.

They dont get any more coins and after a few months the adress is removed.
Perhaps by someone who thinks Bitcoins are for criminals.

We need to give them one donation now and one more donation after another year.


Also a small question, how come the adress has sent some coins?
1BTC1oo1J3MEt5SFj74ZBcF2Mk97Aah4ac

Add me to the list.

Presenting another edit in the form of an actual email to gain a better feel of how it would look from the readers standpoint. For some crazy reason, I opt to write it in E-Prime, compounding the challenge and only adding a couple extra hours to the rewrite. Once again, feel free to reedit and offer up suggestions. Thanks again, to Derek, for taking the initiative in getting this ball rolling.

---

St. Jude Children's Research Hospital
262 Danny Thomas Place
Memphis, TN  38105-3678

December 24, 2011

Please include Bitcoin as a funding option

Dear St. Jude (Donation Department)

Choosing Bitcoin as an additional donation option allows St. Jude to utilize 100% of funds gifted, thereby benefiting more children in need.

We write you today representing a group of 100+ individuals who humbly request your kind consideration of accepting Bitcoin as a donation option, further endowing your acclaimed foundation. Bitcoin100 consists of over 100 members from a community of Bitcoin enthusiasts, developers and common folk, like you. We wish to support St. Jude by contributing to your noble organization a generous gift of 100 bitcoins (100 BTC), currently valued at approximately $391.00. Furthermore, supporters of Bitcoin100 have pledged to continue their support of nonprofit and charitable organizations, like St. Jude, who have included Bitcoin as one of their donation options, thus enabling us to continue our benevolent practice. Additional information pertaining to Bitcoin100 and its supporters, provided here, with our evolving charity list pending contact, available here.

As a charitable organization, St. Jude can easily accept Bitcoin as a donation option. The accounting departing will not have to learn any new technological skill sets associated with Bitcoin unless they choose to. A payment processing service, Bit-Pay, will convert bitcoins donated to St. Jude into US dollars, ready for deposit into your bank account. Bit-Pay offers nonprofit organizations this service with absolutely zero fees, unlike other typical processing systems, stretching those harder-to-come-by dollars into providing more for the children and their parents. Further reading about the services for nonprofits provided by Bit-Pay available here. Once St. Jude implements a 'Donate with Bitcoin' option--conveniently located among the other formidable donation options on your website--we pledge to send the current pool of 100 bitcoins (100 BTC), nearly $400, to your newly listed Bitcoin donation address.

Bitcoin will benefit St. Jude, or any other charitable organization, because of the ability in accepting donations from around the globe, via any internet access nearly instantly, without mandated fees. Bitcoin, a secured digital currency, operates on a completely decentralized network, sharing all recorded transactions. To learn more about this remarkable technology, visit We use Coins at weusecoins.com. Read the user-friendly starter guide, a resource where most of today's users have familiarized themselves with Bitcoin. Then visit bitcoin.org, the open source website, a more in-depth tutorial.

Thank you kindly for your valuable time and consideration of accepting Bitcoin as a viable option to help fund your admirable cause. If you have any questions or concerns feel free to contact me by email @ [redacted] or by phone @ [redacted]


Sincerely,

Derek Herndon
Bitcoin100 Supporter

DH:dh

After some thinking and talking to my gf I came to the conclusion that the paragraph order in the 4th revision is actually slightly better. It's simply secondary to them how the technology works so it makes sense to save it for last. Excellent work.

I'm now happy with the subject as well, it's much better. The dot at the end isn't necessary though, it's not used in subjects generally.

I'm thrilled of how well this project is going. The Bitcoin community is full of smart and decent people who understand the numerous benefits that will come of this. I'm excited about the next step and confident that we'll be very successful. Keep up the good work and Merry Christmas to all of you

Nope.  Don't really know anything about them (DCM.org.nz).  My wife deals with Mike at the shelter and they have space for 23 regulars and some other more casuals.

We worked on a one local, one national and one international as a way of directing some charity.
So we also give money to the books-in-homes program and sponsor a decile 1 school (that's the poor end and fills in the National aspect), but I also have no special link to that program - but we did help the year 5 and 6 classes come to Wellington and covered the costs of their over-night at the zoo.  We have a sponsored child in Bangladesh, and I also do Kiva (the micro lending site for fun - up to 43 loans over there).  It's just random.

hehe, figures it was the other way and after reading over the thing 20 times I finally decided to flip those paragraphs. I wanted to get the reader to the point of just how they would process the donations as soon as possible. I do see where you are coming from and I agree but am on the fence between, 'show decentralization' or 'show payment processing' first. Thank you kindly for your input.

  Anyone else have a take on this aspect of it?

wow, nice work ppl and kudos to you sadpandatech 

the letter is great but i only have one issue, can we move the bit-pay paragraph a bit lower ? For a first contact with bitcoin, from this letter, you get the impression it depends on a central service and i'm sure we don't want that. Switching the bit-pay paragraph with the one that contains "We Use Coins" should be fine. My two Satoshis.

I'm currently under the impression that PatrickHarnett owns this site or, at the very least, is directly connected to this organization, neither of which is relative if that so be the case, but would beg the question as to why a Bitcoin donation option is not already embedded on the website.

Good idea on exporting this, Derek.

I was pondering some of the implications of considering size of the charity. My wife and I also give regulary to small, local causes. Most of which don't have a means to collect funds from outside of their communities. I don't see any reason not to include smaller ones on the list as long as they have some sort of web presence and accept monetary donations.
Maybe we could snip this whole segment and port it over to the Charity List for further discussion?

 cheers

#Bah, my first one would have been fine then.    I have condensed it to be more fitting to an email subject and present it along with Revision 4.
#Again, please note that the formatting is not displayed correctly here.

Rev. 4

  23rd of December 2011


Please include Bitcoin as a funding option.



Dear Org,


  Choosing Bitcoin as an additional donation option allows [Org here] to utilize 100% of donated

funds, benefiting more in need. We write you today representing a group of 100+ people who

humbly request that you consider accepting Bitcoins as an option to donate funds to your cause.

Bitcoin100 consists of 100 members from a community of Bitcoin enthusiasts, developers and

ordinary folk, just like you. We wish to support your charity and would like to do so by giving

with bitcoins. We have each pledged atleast 1 bitcoin to donate to [charity name] and look

forward to doing so. Presently, 100 Bitcoins are worth $393 USD. You can read more about

Bitcoin100 and its supporters here. And some of the other charities we wish to give to on

our Bitcoin100 charity list.


  Being a charitable entity makes it even easier to accept Bitcoins as donations. You will not have

to learn the client or other technical aspects of the technology unless you choose to. There exists

a payment processor that will take your bitcoin donations, collect any desirable donor information

and deposit funds into your bank account on your behalf. This service known as Bit-Pay has

absolutely no fees for non-profit organizations. You can read more about the services for non-

profits from Bit-Pay. As soon as a 'Donate with

Bitcoins' option can be found with your regular online donation information we pledge to send the

current pool of 100 Bitcoins to the address listed there.


 Bitcoins are a digital currency whose transactions are recorded, shared and secured by a completely

decentralized network. Bitcoins will benefit your organization because they can be sent to any other

user around the globe with internet access, nearly instantly and with no mandated fees. More

information about the technology can be found at We use Coins.

Along with a user friendly getting started guide, for most typical users. The open source project's

website can be found here Bitcoin.org


  Thank you very much for your consideration of accepting Bitcoins as a viable option to help fund

your cause. If you have any questions please do not hesitate to contact me by email; [redacted] or

by phone @ [redacted]



  Sincerely,
   Derek Herndon
   Bitcoin100 Pledger

Attention, all!: Serious discussion is warranted here!

Thank you kindly, Technomage, for your valuable input.

^^ agreed if this is being sent as e-mail.

Subject: Please accept our donation.

The lengthy version would be a good intro for the message.

I'm a bit busy right now but the new suggestion for the subject is better. However, I think it's too long. As far as email subjects are concerned, there are a few rules.

1) Keep it simple
2) Keep it simple
3) And so on

The very first text paragraph should then contain the info that can't fit the subject. So I think trimming it a little and then summarizing in the first paragraph and explaining it a little more after that is the way to go.

So short and simple for the subject, a short and to the point first paragraph and finally a few paragraphs containing the details. I'd create my own suggestions if I wasn't busy right now but I hope this helps.

Actually, the current subject revision fits almost perfectly as the very first paragraph of the email. For a subject it simply contains too much information.

http://dcm.org.nz/Links/nightshelter.html

Not sure about all the questions, but the link points in the right direction I think.