Why doesn’t a newspaper do this:
For each online crossword, sudoku or whatever daily quiz the paper uses, that is correctly completed by a reader, (within a certain time period), the paper donates, say, $1 to a local charity. The chosen charity can change daily or weekly.
Have the daily quiz sponsored by an advertiser which will make the charitable donation. The advertiser’s logo and message would sit right next to the quiz. Fifteen minutes to do the quiz means 15 minutes of exposure to the ad.
How many readers will take the time to complete the daily quiz knowing that it will do some social good in their community? How much word-of-mouth will this create as readers get their friends to join in and help fundraise for a charity?
- The reader has fun and gets a warm, fuzzy feeling knowing they did some good.
- The sponsor gains some goodwill, exposure and a tax deduction.
- The newspaper gains goodwill and readers.
- Oh yeah, a charity gets attention and some needed money.
Crossword, sudoku, trivia, jigsaw or easter egg hunt through the paper’s web pages. There are many ways to do this.
A time-limit would be placed on the quiz, for example: the puzzle has to be completed by 5:00 PM each day. The paper would then tally up the results and announce the donation the next day. How many people would come back to see how much money they helped raise? How many people would continue doing the daily quiz in an attempt to top yesterday’s donation? How many advertisers would want to be part of this?
If necessary, one lucky reader could be drawn from all successful entries and that person would win a prize from the sponsor and/or get to choose which charity receives the next donation.
The contest could be geo-blocked and linked to IP addresses, if necessary. It might also be possible to minimize cheating, (prevent people from copying answers from someone else), by slightly changing the quiz each hour.
Alternatively, an upper limit could be set on the daily donation. And, if the day’s limit is not reached, then that day’s amount is added to the next day; if the second day’s limit is not reached, then it gets added to the third day, and so on.
Or, if the newspaper gets, say, 500 correct entries by the contest deadline, the charity gets $1000; if it gets 1000 correct answers, the charity gets $2000; if it gets 2000 correct entries, the charity gets $5000. Run a live count on the page, sort of like a TV telethon.
Readers want to do the right thing, they want to help, they want to make a difference. On their own, readers are just different dots on different pages. Why doesn’t a newspaper put them all on the same page so that when the readers connect themselves, they can produce a nice picture?
Examples of this in action are Free Rice and Free Poverty. There are a few other similar sites.
A larger daily newspaper has the audience and the brand power to really make this take off, especially for local charities and local sponsors.
