This list of FAQs will grow over time as more questions are asked.
- What is Cause Marketing Powered Publishing (CMPP)? The publishing business faces many challenges and CMPP won’t fix all forms of publishing, but we believe that we can provide a Win-Win-Win-Win for:
- Readers/Viewers (great content)
- Contributors (get to help their chosen nonprofit and co-create content)
- Advertisers/sponsors (halo effect due to involvement)
- Nonprofit Causes (donation revenue at no cost & visibility as readers consume content)
- Can I support a general cause category instead of a specific cause? Yes, we are creating buckets of causes (501c3s) with similar missions. The portion of the pooled donations allocated to those category buckets will be distributed to individual 501c3s. The formula we use to allocate across 501c3s within a category is subject to change because there are situations where the formula may not arrive at a fair distribution. We want to be fair.
- Where does the donation money that we give to causes come from? We have advertisers that place ads on our site via programmatic platforms such as DSPs, Google and Facebook. Direct sponsorship deals with advertisers are a second source, and we use affiliate links within content in order to receive revenue from merchants when you buy a product or service. We strive to remain editorially independent in mentioning products or doing reviews of the best products for your life, business and your family. Buying through our links, which earn us a commission we count as ad revenue. There may be additional marketing and advertising revenue sources in the future and those will similarly be considered as revenue for the calculation of our donations to the causes selected by readers and contributors.
- Do I need to register to have a percentage of the donations go to my cause? No: we automatically allocate half of the net advertising/sponsorship revenue generated by readers as a whole to be donated to nonprofits. We use an internal point system to allocate cause donations. See more on the point system here.
- How can I help make sure my chosen cause gets more of the donation pool? There are lots of ways you can help your favorite nonprofit cause. Here are some of our favorites:
- Share your favorite stories with your friends via social media and email (email is sometimes better depending on the person).
- Find your cause’s profile page on Briefme (or any of our sister sites), and share that (the profile pages list all the content created with that cause as a default). When you share that page, your selection of your cause and the same cause being selected by the contributor combine (both 25 percent shares) and your friends and family are REALLY helping your cause.
- If you’ve got friends with larger social networks, make sure they are active sharing the great content they like as well.
- Can I contribute content (video, written content or audio)? We are launching on an invitation-only basis with a strong preference for folks who have proven themselves as writers or content creators, particularly if they are also philanthropic. It never hurts to have a engaged following and personal brand.
- How can you stay in business if half of all your net sponsorship and advertising revenue power donations? Well, time will tell. 😉 We are huge believers in cause marketing and are investing our time, money and effort into making the world a better place through cause marketing and transforming all news we cover to “Good News.” Stay tuned.
- How will you allocate donations when the revenue comes from third party sources (Youtube, syndication, etc.? Great question. Since we can’t track individuals and their choices when they are on third-party sites, we take the 50 percent of net ad revenue from those sources and allocate it pro-rata based on the activities we can measure on our site and in our app (creation, reading/viewing, and sharing).
- Will the CMPP platform be deployed on other sites? We’ve developed the platform to work in two modes:
- Internal Network: as we acquire additional publishing properties, the CMPP will power those as well, with a single registration. The unified registration will power all the sites/properties.
- External network: If other publishers want to designate part of their content as following the CMPP principles then we can license those publishers the platform while powering the registration and reporting side of the relationship.
- I want to add my charity to your system. How can I do that? We’ve started off with a bunch of great charities and cause categories. However, we will add more nonprofits as we go. Often the catalyst for adding a new nonprofit cause is that a content creator or co-creator has a strong interest in a specific cause. We may add an add-cause functionality in the future.
- I’d like to make a contribution to your operating expenses so that you can continue to allocate such a large percentage of ad revenue to nonprofits, will you accept contributions? Stay tuned for a contributions or “tip jar” where readers can help us meet our expenses.
