It is the end of the month.
Not much activity was noticed on 1DodoExzsNPvVRXFrgkKw6E259VjfUW8Kh
I made an initial deposit of 0.1 BTC, I was also sending out
free bitcoin requests to this address
Total accumulated sum over the last month is thus
BTC0.10730912 = £10.24 at today's MtGox rate.
To minimise the costs, I am going to absorb any conversion rates. This means that I am transferring the BTC funds to my account, while sending Durrell Wildlife conservation trust a donation in British Pounds at today's conversion rate, rounded up to the nearest GBP = £11.
The donation of £11 with Reference No: 130430-9097 was sent and marked with the following note:
This is a donation, converted from Bitcoins, collected as the result of my Bitcoin Fundraising for Durrell Wildlife Conservation Trust
http://stanislavs.org/bitcoin-fundraising-for-durrell-wildlife-conservation-trust/
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/bitcoin-fundraising-for-durrell-wildlife-conservation-trust-167416.msg1742875#msg1742875
The campaign continues. Please donate anything between
BTC0.1 and
BTC0.001 to
1DodoExzsNPvVRXFrgkKw6E259VjfUW8Kh Every little helps!
Two weeks ago I wrote the following letter to Anne-Marie Neal, an assistant fundraiser at the Trust. As I am still awaiting their answer, I decided to make the letter open to the public.
Dear Anne-Marie.
I have, on multiple occasions, performed donations and adoptions at Durrell Wildlife Conservation Trust, having recently increased my level of adoptions to Silver. As such, I am always on the look-out for fund-raising opportunities for the Trust.
About 6 months ago I became aware of the growing new global cryptographic electronic currency: Bitcoins. I have since been mining Bitcoins myself and using them in transactions in on-line shops. At the same time I had a thought that Bitcoins, unlike Visa-payments, are ideal for micro-transaction. I wrote then a short letter, suggesting Durrell create a Bitcoin wallet and start accepting donations in Bitcoins. The letter was posted through durrell.org feed-back form, but surprisingly never received any form of reply.
Bitcoins are freely convertible to traditional currencies and have at the moment a conversion rate of approximately USD120 (€93) for 1 BTC.
I have newly started my own Bitcoin-based fund-raising campaign here:
http://stanislavs.org/bitcoin-fundraising-for-durrell-wildlife-conservation-trust/This is also published on the main Bitcoin-related Forum, Bitcointalk:
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/bitcoin-fundraising-for-durrell-wildlife-conservation-trust-167416Thus far 0.10403102 BTC are collected. The main problem for my private campaign, is trust. There are several other charity projects running, but they are supported by entities, who are well-known, whereas I can be considered a new and unknown entity on the scene.
I am sure that if the Trust has their own, official, Bitcoin collection drive, it would attract many more micro-donations, which would amount to a substantial sum.
As you might have noticed, it is possible to customise the beginning of the receiving address to make it more striking. The one I use for my drive is 1DodoExzsNPvVRXFrgkKw6E259VjfUW8Kh It is also possible to use QR code for the ease of making payments - there are smartphone applications, for example from BlockChain.info (
https://blockchain.info/) which make it easy to just scan the code on a phone and perform a payment. BlockChain.info also have ready-made solutions for creating custom donation buttons/interfaces on a web-site.
As it was mentioned by Phinnaeus Gage on the forums, he runs a generic charity fund-raising, which is rather successful, Bitcoin 100:
http://bitcoin100.org/ You can alternatively implement donation redirect to that generic charity and get payouts as fractions of the common amount.
In the long run, however, I think it is best for the Wildlife Conservation Trust to have their own address and a dedicated page on the site, geared to donations in Bitcoins.
The currency is growing in popularity, especially with the near-collapse of the traditional currencies, and Bitcoins collected and stored now will represent a substantial fortune in the near future, which would be used for what the Trust does best, saving species from extinction.
Thank you for your attention.
Kind regards,
Stanislav Sokolov.
A life-time member.