Yesterday I was contacted by Lee Dryburgh, organizer of the eComms Conference.  eComms is a conference about emerging communications focusing on the telecom industry.  Lee told me that he was running a social media experiment of donating $0.50 to Shelter Network, a Bay Area-based charitable organization, for every email subscriber he received for the eComms mailing list.

He explains on a post about this experiment that he wanted to grow his email subscriber list.  Instead of purchasing a list and then trying to get opt-in subscribers from that list, Lee thought he would try to raise money for a charitable organization at the same time.  He has tried enlisting the help of people he calls “social media gurus” to help him spread the word.  The sign-up page states that are approximately 4 updates per month so if you can deal with that, then it’s worth it to sign up and let Lee contribute to Shelter Network on your behalf.  Never heard of Shelter Network?  Check out this video that I found (I can’t embed the video as the feature has been disabled).

I think this is an interesting model of increasing your email subscriber list.  Instead of paying for a list or growing it organically which can take a long time, offer to donate to a charitable organization in exchange for every subscriber you get.

I think there are definitely some flaws to this model though.  When you’re growing your list you want people to sign up who are interested in receiving the updates that you send.  The sheer number of subscribers doesn’t help if you can’t leverage that group to do more in the future.  Even if you aren’t trying to leverage your subscribers, it does no good if they sign up then immediately unsubscribe or mark the email as junk/spam.

But, I do appreciate what Lee is trying to do and think it is a great idea.  I am fascinated at these micro-funding concepts and will be exploring them more throughout 2009.

What are your thoughts on this model of growing your subscriber list?  If you think it’s interesting and you want to do a little bit of good for free, head over the to the sign-up page.

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Photo by: korafotomorgana