Exetel have come up with a great idea to help an endangered bird from hitting extinction.
The bird being the Gouldian Finch, is currently facing extinction, to remove the threat, it would cost an approximate $100,000 a year in donations to assist, over 3 years.
$300,000 over 3 years. Seems pretty easy to generate that sort of dollars.
The plan seems so far, to have 50c off each customers monthly fee donated to a wildlife conservation fund to save species from Extinction.
When you consider a lot of extinction threats are introduced / caused by man, it only makes sense that man makes up for it.
But, I’m not saying this poor bird should simply be left alone and unhandled, our planet faces heavier ‘extinction’ related problems. And in the sum of things, if we have a choice between saving a bird, or the planet we call our home, I’m more than certain we will want to save the planet.
That said, it would only take $10,000 in donations a month to contribute to saving the bird. 50c off 60,000 users is a lot of USABLE money (I say usable here, because charities have high costs in processing individual donations, one aggregate donation is cheap). Over the course of a month, they would raise $30,000 off just 50c off each users fee. That money would do a lot of good among many charities who are managed right.
Think how many trees could be planted to combat carbon emissions? Or better yet, think of what sort of research those dollars would buy in several different senses, such as research into medicine, or research into saving animals, or even saving our planet of course.
Then, if other ISPs also followed suit and simply took as little as 5c from a lot of users, the aggregate level would be something really tangible and usable to charities across Australia and the world.
Then again, many other businesses could do the same as well, and do a lot of good, such as Telstra and it’s near 9,000,000 odd customer lines it collects dollars off. Just 5c off each of those would do a lot of good to some very worthwhile causes on this planet.
Exetel have shown they don’t have greedy intentions in running an ISP, which is great, because it shows they have a conscience, and they have at least seen part of this world and want to do something towards helping it.
My idea is for them to setup an aggregate donation site, where donations are aggregated and users can vote for their percentage to go to some particular cause (such as the Gouldian Finch).
Aggregate donations will do more than a door knock, more than those employees being paid to sign up shoppers to a ‘charity’, more than those charities who can afford to telemarket, and get donations.
The aggregate donations when managed in a low management manner (such as just 50c off all customers) attracts better results for the charity, they no longer have to pay accounting staff to account for the millions of donations if they are just getting it in one big donation.
I begin to ponder whether there is a service out there already to do something like this to assist charities in raising money, without high overheads. Just one big aggregate donation, instead of millions of small, ‘enter this data’ style donations that end up costing a lot of the donated money.
Back to the topic, Wildlife / Nature conservation is a smart move, the obvious return on this move would be perhaps additional customers, seeing the support of such causes as being ‘normal’.
Exetel haven’t started yet (its only just come up for public discussion on the Exetel forums), but assuming they do, I can imagine they’ll get a fair bit of good results for both the charity, and themselves from being seen as a positive ISP.
Enjoy!