How to respond to a fiat donation request

[garyrowe]

Recently I've been receiving emails from various lobbying groups asking for donations. Invariably they all require some kind of credit card transaction or PayPal and so on. I've starting taking the time to respond to each using a fairly standard form letter that I thought I'd share here in case others find it useful.

Perhaps if enough of us respond using variations of this letter adjusted to our own preferences it may start to have an impact. I've tried to follow the rules laid out by the wiki article on press releases, let me know where I've introduced fail.

...
Hi,

I recently received an email from your group asking for donations. I noticed that you are wishing to promote "a more just economy" and to that end I would like to draw your attention to Bitcoin. Bitcoin provides an additional donation strategy that has the following features:

+ You do not have to pay any fees to receive bitcoins
+ You do not have to register with anyone to send or receive them
+ You can exchange bitcoins for most currencies (certainly USD, EUR and GBP) any time or day of the week (24/7)
+ You can receive donations offline (i.e. you can print the address on paper handouts if required)
+ You can receive donations from anyone, anywhere in the world (Bitcoin is global)
+ You are immune from boycotts by payment processors
+ All the software required to operate them is free and open source
+ Bitcoin itself promotes a fair and just economy by offering people an internet currency not under anyone's control (no government, no corporation, just a collaborative global effort)

In order to receive payments via Bitcoin you need only do 2 things (overall time to complete is under 5 minutes):

1) Download a free and open source program to generate a Bitcoin address (think of it as like an email address to receive donations)
2) Post that Bitcoin address on the same page as your other payment options

An example of how it can be used is shown here: http://gary-rowe.com/agilestack/2012/01/09/how-to-accept-bitcoins-on-your-blog-with-no-code/

You can find out more about Bitcoin at the main site here: http://bitcoin.org

If you decide you want to try it out. Then see here for the main client choices: http://bitcoin.org/clients.html. I recommend MultiBit for your requirements.

If you have any further questions, I would be happy to answer them for you.

Kinds regards

Gary

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[kjlimo]

I told my college (when they gave me their annual donation request phone call) that if they started accepting bitcoins, I'd gladly pledge money to them..

They just took it as I pledged $100 and started sending me reminders to make my donation... stupid morons, go back and listen to the recorded phone conversation!

End result: I now have on more piece of junk mail each month...


But I agree, keep up the good work and eventually they will get on board.

The number one reason merchants aren't accepting bitcoins is that their customers aren't asking for them to accept bitcoins!

[Stephen Gornick]

But I agree, keep up the good work and eventually they will get on board.

The number one reason merchants aren't accepting bitcoins is that their customers aren't asking for them to accept bitcoins!

There are different scenarios that will cause merchants to start accepting bitcoin.   Bit-Pay claims to have 550 merchants now, so we will probably see some ecommerce site that attributes partial credit for its growth to the cost savings it gained when using bitcoin.  And that will get a little press and that might be a catalyst for a snowball.

Additionally, there could be a killer app causing there to be many more people with bitcoins to spend.  That's really what needs to happen before retail merchants are anywhere near seeing bitcoin as being worth the effort.  Perhaps something like SatoshiDICE getting real popular (think 1000X current levels) might cause this to happen at some level.  Players can get BTCs by depositing cash at 7-eleven, but cashing out to bank is a hassle.  They might just prefer then to simply pay for a meal with bitcoins instead then, for example.

But it never hurts to put a bug in their ear ... "I'ld prefer to use bitcoin".  Just don't be disheartened that it doesn't happen right away though.