jc00ke

We've actually had pretty good responses. You can always say N/A.

This approach was instrumental to our early success & the way we worked with investors/donors. Chase and Grace worked so hard at raising our philanthropic round but being a small team it took a huge chunk of time away from product, operations, marketing, etc.

I hope other nonprofits can give this a try and have similar positive experiences.

I mistakenly cut off the full title of the post: "Matz's Ruby Developers Don't Use RubySpec and It's Hurting Ruby"

My pleasure ;) I'll go update the wiki.

Updated: https://github.com/rspec/rspec/wiki/Background

Probably much more mappy and reducey ;)

Actually, I'd be curious to see this done in another system too.

Well, if some company out there would kick it up a notch wrt design and not just compatibility, I'll buy it. Different strokes...

You're right, after 2 years it shouldn't be cracking, but I really do like everything else about the machine.

I just want nice things! ;)

One important factor for my choice in laptops is the physical attributes of the machine. IMO, Samsung and Apple, and to some extent Asus, have very well designed machines. Maybe I'm a little bit vain, but I'd like for my Linux laptop to look good too. That's one thing Apple always got right. The ThinkPad X1 Carbon is rad, but I don't really like the way it looks. I'm not sure how to reconcile that.

ZaReason and System76 are awesome companies! I purchased a small notebook from ZaReason back in '08 but returned it because it was too underpowered. I would happily buy a laptop from either ZaReason or System76 if it was in the same vein of well designed hardware like the 3 companies I mentioned above.

I'm also very familiar with the Windows tax. A few years back I tried, very hard, to get HP to refund the Windows license on 2 desktops I bought for my dad. It was futile. Here are the blog posts from '09

HP Refund for Windows Tax: So far so good - http://bit.ly/wy4zC HP Refund for Windows Tax: No refund policy - http://bit.ly/1a0FW1

Trust me, I hate seeing the little Windows 7 sticker and Windows super key on my laptop, but the hardware is good and I have no compatibility issues. Ideal? Nope. But good enough, and unfortunately that's what we Linux users have to contend with for now.

Curious as to why you didn't use the ActionMailer delayed extension? https://github.com/mperham/sidekiq/wiki/Delayed-Extensions#a...

Also isn't it dangerous to override `EmailDeliverer.send` like that?

Good question. $1.5M is a lot of amount of money, but it will by no means fund all the patients, so there will always be treatments for donors to fund.

Good catch. While the site isn't served over SSL, the actual Wufoo form is. And Stripe (who we're using to process the payments) only allows payments over SSL (https://stripe.com/help/ssl) so your information is safe.

This!

Multiple times she said Github raised money from Kleiner Perkins, right? They raised the money from Andreesen Horowitz. I'm not crazy, right? Right?

We just learned about GiftAid not too long ago. I'll pass this on to our finance guy to take a look, thanks!

No, we're focused on treatment, not prevention. We have funded a few malnutrition cases, and we would like to fund more, but prevention isn't really our thing. There are other orgs, like the Gates Foundation, that are doing a great job at tackling that side of the coin.

One of our goals is to facilitate an emotional connection between donors and patients. If good photos help us raise more money faster, then we may even have a moral obligation to use photos. We need donors to trust us, so yes, the photos are also there to reassure them that there is a person on the other side of the transaction.

Can you imagine any crowdfunding site out there, especially Watsi, without photos?

Stay tuned, we're addressing that next ;-)

We have had some traction in Europe already, but it's been a while since we ran the numbers. We do have a blog post on the topic: http://j.mp/is-generosity-geographic? and we'll be looking to expand wherever we can.

As for regular bank transactions, we're going to explore it. For now you can hook up your bank to your Paypal account. It's not ideal though, we know!

Thanks for your support!

Yeah, we'll consider that. Thanks Dave! ;-)

http://wishbone.org/ is another education-based crowdfunding platform. I really like their graphic design, and they have a great mission.

I wonder if a focus/blur combo would trigger the needed event and the value would be set? I need to try it out.

I run a small, internet-based non-profit (in a totally unrelated sphere, contemporary art)

Early on we were approached by a budding organization that wanted to license our platform. I was initially excited by the potential for revenue, but shortly realized that what we were building would be too custom to us. Coming from a consulting background, I didn't think it would be worth it to the licensee.

how to think about competition in the non-profit sector

Yes, this is interesting to think about. My personal opinion is that non-profits might be better off moving more towards a for-profit model in terms of needing an actual revenue model. There are a ton of great non-profits out there, but I'm not convinced fundraising is the only way to stay in business in the long term.

Thanks for the discussion!

Thanks for the UK idea. Luckily we can also chat with Prizeo, one of the companies in our YC batch.

Like http://www.donorschoose.org ?

My understanding is that normally as a business the considerations here would be competitive, right? But that doesn't apply in the context of non-profits.

There's competition in every market, non-profits included. Even though we're not trying to compete for dollars (necessarily) in that we hope to help "grow the pie," we are competing for attention. Anyway, that's probably another discussion.

If someone else came in and used your "core business code" to make something which was then helpful to other people, that would be a good thing, right?

Of course! My hunch is that that the existing open source systems out there that do the crowdfunding thing would suffice. Catarse[1] is one I can think of off the top of my head. I looked into using it for Watsi but decided it wasn't going to work. My point is is that there is already software out there like ours. The fact that someone could use ours as a base is nice, but not motivation enough to open it up. Are crowdfunding platforms going to become the new CMS? It might already be happening.

A sort of "in-kind" donation of their time and energy and expertise, right?

Yes, and we are already leveraging that, just selectively. Everything takes time, especially managing open source software. Even though the tools have gotten much better (does anybody remember what life was like before Githug, et al?) it doesn't mean the cost of managing the contributions have gone down to zero. We want to leverage energy where we can, but in a way that works for us. Open sourcing our code doesn't necessarily feel like the right approach to me.

[1] https://github.com/catarse/catarse

re: UK localization - mind emailing us connect@watsi.org about this? I'm curious to learn more about how the UK handles donations, especially if there is a tax (VAT?) involved. Thanks!

This is a known issue with tools like 1password and LastPass. I'm not sure how to fix it. If you have any ideas, please hit me up on Twitter: @jc00ke.

We have considered this a few times, but I always come back to the fact that our app is specific to us. I don't think it's useful to others, per se. Also, most startups don't open source their core business code. Some do, and I think it makes sense for them. I don't think it makes sense for us though.

Open source is hugely important to me, and Watsi wouldn't be what it is without all those awesome people out there writing code for the masses. Props to them!

We've had some other partners ask for a way to automate donations. We have a plan for that, and we'll be working on it next.

That's a really good idea. We started sketching out the API a bit ago but had to put it on hold. It's something we want/need to get right. Hopefully I get some time in the next few months to get started on it.