neotek

Hey pal, sorry to reply to this comment in an off-topic way, but if I post this as a top-level comment, AutoModerator will remove it because it doesn't contain a question.

Your Indiegogo needs some serious work. Two donation tiers, $500 and $25,000, is an instant turnoff for 99.999% of people who will visit that page. The majority of people passing by won't realise they can donate any amount they like.

You have a great story and have the opportunity here to raise some serious money for your awesome work, but that Indiegogo page is ruining it for you. There's a bunch of basic psychology at work here, you need to provide tiers that reduce the friction of donation - something someone can look at and think to themselves, that's within my budget, that's something I can click right now which will make a difference. Take your cues from the thousands of other charities out there raising funds for their equally worth causes, and introduce the following tiers (for example):

$1 - thanks for the support, we'll send you email updates

$7 - pays for x minutes worth of fuel for the plane (or some other easily-relatable number)

$15 - pays for another easily-relatable number, like it covers the expenses of one local worker for a day, or whatever

$25, $50, $100, and $250, again with easily-relatable numbers.

Also, there are dozens of companies out there who do nothing more than help you pump the shit out of your crowd funding efforts in exchange for a percentage of the take (around 15% usually), and it's well worth engaging one of them. Every big charity in the world pays external sources to help them fundraise. If you've ever had someone wearing a badge knock on your door and talk to you about donating the Medecins sans Frontiers, that's a paid salesperson. If you've ever been stopped in a shopping mall by someone asking you to donate to Greenpeace, that's a paid salesperson. It's hugely effective and relatively inexpensive compared to the return.

It would be so incredibly easy to take a piece of instantly viral content like this and make it huge. If the internet can raise hundreds of thousands of dollars for people who lose their jobs or get bullied or want to sell some rebranded piece of shit from Alibaba, it can sure as hell do it for a charity that saves the lives of elephants.

Best of luck to you and the people you work with!

Please, for your own sake, take 5 minutes to add the extra tiers now in between answering questions. You don't even need to spend much time adding clever descriptions or figure out the numbers that I mentioned before, just at least add the tiers ($1, $7, $15, $25, $50, $100, and $250) with a couple of words to indicate how important your work is.

Strike while the iron is hot, this AMA will likely be seen by tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of people who are primed with interest in your story, many of whom will be eager to donate to such a worthy cause.

Front page of every Murdoch paper tomorrow:

"PRO-SCIENCE" LUDLUM DOESN'T KNOW HOW LIGHTNING WORKS

Awesome, you are a dead set legend mate. I can't even begin to imagine the horrible shit you see and the side of humanity that the vast majority of us will never experience other than through the pictures you've posted.

I hope every single person who reads this AMA takes the time to sling a few bucks your way, you deserve it.

You can't copyright a title.