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.
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
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.
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.
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?
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!