Nickels for Katrina
Date
Fall 2005
Team
The two man team consisted of myself and one of my friends in the Information Systems program.
My Role on the Team
Marketing, Development
Background
The idea for Nickels For Katrina was inspired by Alex Tew’s "Million Dollar Homepage." Alex had an unbelievable amount of success with the site and there have been enumerable copycats already.
When looking at all of these sites we thought that it was a great idea except that everyone is taking the money and putting it in their own pocket. We thought that it would be great to create a site where the money goes to people who really need it. This is a way we can donate our efforts and truly help people who live outside our local community.
The Solution
To raise money for Hurricane Katrina relief, we built Nickels For Katrina. The site is a digital billboard that we sell real-estate on for charity. There are 1 million pixels for sale on the home page for $.05 each. Although the two of us were just learning PHP, Apache and MySQL, the site was launched over the course of three days.
Buy Pixels
The core functionality of the site is to buy pixels. We allow customers to purchase pixels in blocks of 100 (10x10). When a visitor purchases pixels, they specify a URL to link to, where on the page they would like their advertisement, and a graphic to be displayed. All payment is processed via PayPal. Once we receive confirmation that the order has gone through we post their requests to the main page.
Money Raised
The site has been able to raise over $2900 from over 40 sponsors. All of this money has been contributed directly to The Red Cross.
Press Attention
Nickels For Katrina has been noticed by a number of different blogs and newspapers including the Wall Street Journal, Pittsburgh Post Gazette and iLounge. We also received the "Single Outstanding Community Service Event" from Kappa Sigma Fraternity's national organization. This attention has resulted in over 15,000 unique visitors to the site.
Technologies Used
- PHP, Apache, MySQL
- PayPal
Unique Challenges
- There were only two of us on the team and we were unfamiliar with the technology that we were using. Since we were just learning PHP, Apache, and MySQL, implementing the "Buy Pixels" functionality wasn't a no-brainer. We had to make it easy not only for customers to go through the order process, but also figure out how our fulfillment process would fit in.
- We were working on a super fast-paced schedule. Once we got the idea to build this site, we worked around-the-clock for three days straight. This was good because it encouraged constant communication and helped us focus on what was most important. However, it little time for anything else in our lives.
- Once the site went live and got significant traffic, we had to handle all customer service requests ourselves. After we were noticed by a few blogs and word began to spread we had a huge spike in traffic. Putting the site out in the wild demonstrated our initial design flaws. If one customer having trouble with something, it was likely that ten others were too. We had to cope with these issues and make changes to the site immediately.