Happy Veterans Day!!!
Quick Summary: Ok here’s the Skippy- Write a decent post this month and a donation will be made to support the troops. The writing must be unique and not found anywhere else online. Throughout November 2009, when you write an interesting post (as many of you have been anyway) to IdahoFallsToday.com, I’ll personally donate $2 for each post up to $200, and make a note on your post that you supported the troops with your article. Billionaire Warren Buffet I am not, so that’s the best I can do. The donation goes to The National Military Family Association and you’ll see your donation reflected in the widget below.
Long Version: Enjoy writing a post and do a little something for Veterans at the same time. Writing a post that thousands will read is fun anyway, so this is just a little extra kicker as a reminder you have done a good thing. I’m just an occasional admin of this site (not the owner); and in addition to the donation I’ll also make a permanent note on your post that you supported our troops. Sure, by itself it’s $2 but it adds up collectively. And that $2 supports the troops more than affixing a yellow-ribbon “Support the Troops” sticker to a car bumper (nothing at all wrong with those by the way).
How will this work? Write a good post and I’ll take care of the rest. There’s no sneaky Tom-Foolery going on here. Here’s more detail if interested.
- Write a unique post (not found anywhere else online) good enough to get approved for display on the site. The bar will not be set high, but there is a bar. Please make your best effort.
- I donate $2 to the NMFA using the donation widget below. To reduce the number of micro transactions, I may wait until at least 5 more posts are accumulated($10 donation) but a donation will be made because of your post no matter what.
- After the donation for your post is made, I’ll make a note of it on your post.
- That’s it! You’ll see the donation amount increase on the top of the widget. To illustrate this, I donated $10 – you can see the donation amount on the top of the widget.
Where is this going to? The National Military Family Association. I had to choose a Veterans-related non-profit organization quickly and I couldn’t find a local Idaho Falls area organization in which donations could be accepted and tracked in a widget like this. I know there are some fantastic local chapter military organizations so I apologize I couldn’t make that work in time – I will add links to some of them in this post later. So at a minimum of course, I had to make sure that whatever organization I chose was efficient, effecitve, and highly legitimate.
Charity Navigator (independent analysis and reviews of such non-profits) rates it 4/4 stars and the corresponding rating page can be found here: National Military Family Associations page at Charity Navigator. The organization’s website is here: http://www.militaryfamily.org There are other and possibly better great organizations of course, but this is one of the highest rated and I had to choose one and not use that as an excuse to delay a post. Things I looked for were things such as high percentage of donations going toward actual program expenses (no less than 80%), reasonable salary for the top administrator (in this case, MUCH lower than any other I looked at), established legitimacy (over 40 years in this case) etc.
Here’s the description from the Charity Navigator page:
National Military Family Association is the only national organization that for more than 40 years has represented officer and enlisted families of the Army, Navy, Air Force, Marine Corps, Coast Guard, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and Public Health Service. We help those seeking resources for: themselves and combat-weary service members returning home from war with fragile mental heath, for optimistic-but-anxious children separated from parents during deployments, for spouses forging ahead with educations to build better lives for their families or to prepare for the unthinkable, for widows seeking information about benefits available to them as they cope with their losses, and for proud parents of single service members. We identify and work with others to resolve emerging military family-related issues.
This post might be ignored, but if there are comments: As a personal request, I’d like this topic to be for the grown-ups. Please let it be free of partisan politics and free of any negativity toward any group/country/culture/religion/etc. If you use this topic to score points against your favorite nemesis, then that says more about you than it does anything else. If you’re anti-veteran for some reason or not interested in the topic, I can respect that. Just move on to another post.
The “Network For Good” fee for the donation tracking system and badge shown above is 4.75% of each donation. I’ll be covering that fee as well. In other words, the full $2 for each post will go to the National Military Family Association.
Thanks for reading! And again, Happy Veterans Day!
Best Regards,
A mostly anonymous Towel-Snapper and U.S. Army Vet
P.S. Not sure where to click? Write a Post
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Gato got runned over by Marcus many moons ago. Be ye daft, 2486? 
Let's have a new poll, alright, Joe?
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Given the averages, I’m expecting to be donating significantly less than $100 by the end of the month – not even close. But just in case there are more people out there who support Veterans enough to run with this, I thought I’d better cap it at $200 to avoid too much damage.
I’m in, but could you clarify what classifies as “interesting”?
I’ll give it a shot. I guess I’ll see if it’s interesting when I see how many comments there are : )
Thank you for offering this up! I might even take you up on it.
Hey Hardon, chances are, the fact that you asked and are concerned about that means your post will be fine.
I’m setting the bar low, but I did want to make the point that there is a bar.
Additionally, (and I’ll add this to this post), whatever you write must be unique – it can’t be found anywhere else online. This isn’t about just copy/pasting. Other than that, thanks for saying you’re in! I hope you really will post.
Make sure it’s submitted before the deadline – this ends November 30, 2009 at 11:59pm and you can write as many as you want. so tell your mom, tell your address book about it. You won’t see anything like this for a post on Craigslist.
Lift a finger (and 9 others for typing) to support Veterans with your thoughts and my money.
Status Update:
As of now, there have been 14 posts written since this one. All have qualified for the $2 donation except for one – I’ve tagged the bottom of each of those qualifying posts accordingly. The widget in the post above reflects these donations – the total is now at $36 (including the initial $10).
There were 4 “announcement” posts that are close to the line since they’re mostly limited to a promotional where/when of an event. However, since the events were interesting, and the content is unique as far as I know (didn’t see it elsewhere online), they qualified. Additionally, we need a good “Events Calender” application for this site where people can add such things as well. I haven’t found the right one yet, but IdahoFallsToday.com will have something like that asap.
The only post I couldn’t donate for so far is one that is posted on the author’s site as well. The post qualifies in every other way except that it was originally posted elsewhere.
Keep it up friends!
TO DONATE BY MAIL Your contribution payable to DAV may be sent to: Disabled American Veterans P.O. Box 14301. Cincinnati, OH 45250-0301
I just donated through the badge again and I believe I’m all caught up as of today ($2 per post). That’s an initial $10 donation + $40 totalling $50 so far.
The real news however is that the total is actually $150. Someone used this badge to donate an additional $100! THANK YOU to whoever this anonymous person is, and to everyone who has written a post.
There’s one day left for the donation to post offer!