Need to get £6m Urgently !

[fresh79]

Some of you on Acorn may know already, but for those who don't, Last year my daughter was born with Cystic Fibrosis. It can be a life threatening illness and generally means your life expectancy is cut short through living with bad lungs.

A crucial study on gene therapy has been taking place over the last 10 years and is now in phase 2 of testing, Which in pharmaceutical terms is agonisingly close to becoming available. However the funding has ran out and the whole project is periously close to being shut down. £30m has been raised for this project over the last 10 years and now there is a £6m shortfall.
more info here & here

How can Acorn members help?
I know Acorn has some pretty influential members within the UK and some well connected people. All I ask is that some of you spend 30 mins scratching your heads and seeing if we can come up with some sort of great fundraising project. For those with great raffle domains please check out Rogavi and see how you can help the cause. Perhaps someone with a good raffle name knows someone who is willing to donate a nice prize, And another person knows how to SEO that raffle to maximum impact?
Alternitivley, If you would like to make a donation please see the CFtrust website. or visit virgin moneygiving

So guys and girls, what do you think? £6m is nothing when compared to the total spend on the final transfer day or the Tech Track 100 results and many many other things.

Any ideas or suggestions most welcome please!

Thanks

 

[Blossom]

I'm willing to help with SEO/content writing if/when it's needed, just let me know.

Might be worth trying to get Dreamhost on board, they have a list of charities they support and they quadruple the donations that customers make.

Would be good to target the blogging community as well by sending a quotable paragraph or two to people and asking if they'd write a short post to help promote it.

Perhaps tweeting influential people would help too?

 

[Pred]

very worthwhile charity

any help I can offer I'm willing to help

how about an auction here people donate a few domains to and all profits go to charity

maybe start a charity account, cant remember name of site, where people link to when wanting donations for marathons or sponsored walks.
is it justgiving.com?

if we all put that link on a couple of sites

or better still have a dedicated site. all link to , to get ranked high for term and have official justgiving link and banner to account and can watch target being reached
could be fun

just some ideas

 

[Pred]

another idea
start a mini petition to nominet
many people on acorn have contributed to the large cashpile nominet are sitting on due to auctions
also barely a day goes by where all of us dont send nominet 12 quid

how about if we all siogn a letter to nominet saying how about you give a small slice of your huge cashpile to this extremely worthwhile charity
one which we ALL back

tell me where to sign my name and address.......

 

[newguy]

That's a great idea pred, and it sounds like the most worthy of causes. I'm pretty sure everyone here would sign and it would no doubt make a massive difference to the lives of those in serious need. It's mind boggling to me how funds often seem to find their way everywhere apart from where they are most needed.

 

[Pred]

i was thinking about this the other day, i must give nominet 5k a year in transfer fees

minimum 3k
some days i have 4 or 5 different transfers to pay for
i know i'm not alone!

 

[GreyWing]

Good memory Guy,

I know they like to hide this away so most of the charities submitted are actually submitted by Nominet board members and staff. But you will usually get a fair crack at it if you submit your ideas.

http://www.nominettrust.org.uk/how-apply-0

 

[Pred]

Thanks for link Graham

if o/p wants to rustle together an application
I'm sure we can get a lot of names and sigs added
including prominent members, forum owner, etc.

if they don't play ball
we'll picket them and not pay transfer fees

we have enough high profile Welsh members with stellar portfolios, they're experts on industrial action

 

[fresh79]

I'm willing to help with SEO/content writing if/when it's needed, just let me know.

Might be worth trying to get Dreamhost on board, they have a list of charities they support and they quadruple the donations that customers make.

Would be good to target the blogging community as well by sending a quotable paragraph or two to people and asking if they'd write a short post to help promote it.

Perhaps tweeting influential people would help too?

Thanks Blossom, Some great ideas, I think it was on acorn that i read about Mat Lucas tweeting about a funny ebay auction for a wetsuit, It went viral and raised loads of cash.
Perhaps you could use all your skill to make a really good tweet about it? it being either an auction/raffle or nominet petettion or whatever?

how about an auction here people donate a few domains to and all profits go to charity

Thanks Pred, I was thinking of something like this. maybe we can do a raffle, Say everyone puts in a couple of names/sites until there is 50 or so, and say £20 per ticket?
The whole process would have to be done officially but thats where Rogavi come in. Hopefully once the whole of Acorn are onboard with tickets we could tweet/go viral and see how much we can raise?

another idea
start a mini petition to nominet
many people on acorn have contributed to the large cashpile nominet are sitting on due to auctions
also barely a day goes by where all of us dont send nominet 12 quid

how about if we all siogn a letter to nominet saying how about you give a small slice of your huge cashpile to this extremely worthwhile charity
one which we ALL back

tell me where to sign my name and address.......

This is another great idea! I would imagine from a technical point its easy enough to have a tickbox to donate at transfer. That said how would we go about this?
I see that nominet already have a chosen charity they choose each year, http://www.nominet.org.uk/about/background/charity/
They also state "We match employee fundraising efforts pound for pound and encourage participation at all levels."

Perhaps if they had something in place to recognise an Acorn user in transfer process, we could ask them to match the fee pound for pound? So Acorn user spends £12 = Nominet gives £12 to charity? or something along those lines?
Its a long shot. And I dont really have any idea of how to write this proposal although I will give it a go,

Good memory Guy,

I know they like to hide this away so most of the charities submitted are actually submitted by Nominet board members and staff. But you will usually get a fair crack at it if you submit your ideas.

http://www.nominettrust.org.uk/how-apply-0

Thanks for the link Greywing
It looks like CF might fall outside of the area of focus for nominettrust? but its worth looking at, Perhaps just go the direct route and try to lobby for CF to be the chosen charity next year? Although im not sure how charity fundraising works on a corporate level and I would like to think that they are already aware of the CFTrust.
Perehaps its best if i speak with the CFTrust and ask if they have applied/worked with/know who Nominet are first.


Thanks again for everyones help

 

[LordBull]

I would be happy to pledge 5 decent .co.uk's for the Charity Raffle plan.

And buy a ticket

We could surely get to 100+ domains as the prize.

At the very least Nominet could waive the multiple-fees for those

Best of luck,


Patrick

 

[Retired_member41]

Some great ideas there, I would certainly buy a few tickets.

So when a drug like this is released, is it free?

Ive often wondered about all the money ive given to cancer charities over the years, only to see on the news that it costs thousands a week for people to use the new drugs.

 

[killaclown]

if i can do anything, let me know. Always happy to a good cause

 

[Ashton]

Wouldn't a drug company fund this so they could have rights to the drug? I know its not the best way, but anyway is better than the research being trashed...

I would be happy to do my bit towards this.

 

[scwebsites]

Perhaps Approach Google for some free advertising... http://www.google.co.uk/grants/

 

[retired_member33]

10% of all sales from my hotel websites which I am selling here will be given to the fund.

Not much, but its something

 

[GreyWing]

Hidden away to the extent of having an obvious link directly from the Nominet Trust homepage, and a link returned in the search results from Google for "nominet trust".

Good to see you got your balls back Davy, opened up a nice big can of man and decided to get back into trolling, sort of anyway. After your Jeremy Kyle styled flip out 2 weeks ago I did hope you would have come back with something a little better than one line and your little blue face thingy.

Anyway to answer your point (because this thread deserves it, your post doesn't) and not to carry this thread into a different direction. I was referring to a point that was raised to me when I was standing as a Non-Exec of Nom. They wanted excess profits to be used to abolish transfer fees etc for domains rather than going towards the Nominet foundation. A few people raised concerns that about 97% of causes which received money were submitted by Board members and they thought that the board were only doing it to receive recognition / awards for their charity work. 2 years on and Lesley has an OBE and various other awards do they have a point?

It was also asked at the AGM I was at in 2009, about the difficulty of submitting or being aware of the possibility of submitting a good cause.

I have received about 1.8 trillion emails from Nominet, I can't remember receiving one about anything to do with the Nominet Trust or how to submit a good cause to it. There is no link to the trust from Nominet's home page either. So for the rest of us who pay into Nominet's Trust one way or another and don't troll Nominet, how would we be aware of it? 720 "Nominet Trust" (zero for "Nominet Trust Funding") searches a month according to GKT is not a lot when you consider the number of people that actually pay indirectly towards it.

Fresh79.... If you ever want to put your cause on one of my names that I'm about to set up then drop me a pm. I'm sure a few will know what it is and I'm keen to help real cases like yours.

 

[GreyWing]

I know you like to tell lies to assist in your falsifications about me as part of your attempts to smear me because of various beliefs you hold, possibly contributed to because I have been prepared to challenge you on here. It's already on record that you some history of make defamatory statements so expecting anything more of you two years on would be optimistic. Nethertheless I'll continue to point out your, and anyone else's, misinformation where appropriate. Rest assured that I'm not picking on you. If it suits you to consider that my pointing out of obvious misinformation constitutes "trolling", that's simply more of your ignorance.

Mini flip out part 2?

I think I had the decency to start a separate thread when challenging you. I don't think this thread warrants our disagreements. If you want to start a thread I'd be more than happy to discuss these things with you. This thread is about a certain issue that is a little above us.

 

[GreyWing]

If "telling the truth" and "detailing facts" constitutes a "mini flip out" in your opinion.

You've never "challenged" me. However I believe you started a thread about me, which I only briefly saw part of, that was pulled because, I am told, that members felt you were simply being "a bully". So it wasn't about "decency" at all.

I don't have any particular disagreements with you other than when you post misinformation in a thread, as you did above. When you, or anyone else, does that I am going to comment in the thread because that's how forums work.

I feel I have made my points and don't currently feel I have anything further to add.

What's all this got to do with the original post?

 

[fresh79]

I would be happy to pledge 5 decent .co.uk's for the Charity Raffle plan.

And buy a ticket

We could surely get to 100+ domains as the prize.

At the very least Nominet could waive the multiple-fees for those

Best of luck,


Patrick

This is an excellent idea and im in the process of getting it started.
So far I have written to the raffle people and they are "on-board" so to speak, they also think it is a great idea.

I have started writing a letter to Nominet asking if
A: can a domain name be raffled?
B: Can you waive the fee and help the winner?

(If anyone wants to see this letter or help make it better please PM me)

Once I have a yes or no, i can go about asking who wants to donate a name into the prize fund.
If we had a prize fund of say 100 .co.uk's what sort of price would be fair for a ticket? £25 - £50 Any suggestions?
Also to keep it simple and fair and stop people from judging names on value, I think all names should be submitted unanimously to the raffle people, Perhaps via admin?
Obviously you could "who is" the prize fund, but in the spirit of charity, If we could all just give 1 or more names, regardless of value, the more the better but its up to you what you decide to give.

Wouldn't a drug company fund this so they could have rights to the drug? I know its not the best way, but anyway is better than the research being trashed...

I would be happy to do my bit towards this.

Its a good question and it does seem daft to let 10 years of research just end without finishing it? or salvaging it?
I will ask the CFtrust your question because I think its a valid point, and hopefully it will help others understand if they are considering entering names into the draw.
Here is my personal opnion on why its like this....
The CFgenetherapy consortium is made up of departments from Univeristy of Oxford, University of Edingburgh and Imperial College London.
The research is in the public domain and will no doubt help other branches of gene therapy but even if the drug companies were allowed to get there hands on this - Whats in it for them?
Why cure genes at cell level when you can prescribe somebody expensive medicine each month.
Just my view - but i will get your question answered by CFtrust.

10% of all sales from my hotel websites which I am selling here will be given to the fund.

Not much, but its something

A True Gentleman - Thank you very much

 

[retired_member33]

A True Gentleman - Thank you very much

No problem, always up for a bit of help to a good cause.

2 sites sold so far, thats £10 raised

Will wait a bit longer and see if more sites are sold and then donate the money.