Does crowdtilt only accept credit cards? Fortunately https://archive.org/donate/ accepts PayPal and other methods. Personally, I only impulse donate to small causes and having finding my CC is enough to make me "just do it later" (aka, forget to do it at all).
I think it is too early to start a campaign to raise funds. They first need to meet with their insurance provider to find out what is covered and what is not, then go to the public for funding. Unless they were grossly under insured and knew it, 1 day isn't enough time to determine what's covered.
Worst case, they get money that they didn't need for the repairs. And they put it to good use doing one of the many other things this super valuable (IMO) non-profit does.
I must be naive too, then, because this is what I thought at first. Anything that gets dollars into the hands of the archive.org folks is fine with me, but this is what insurance policies are for.
But often not the time to rebuild, reconfigure, re-layout, re-do, set-up, test every new item you get back. You might even have custom built, one-off pieces which will take even more effort to replace with whatever replacement gadget you get.
The article's only five paragraphs; maybe you could try reading it? "High-end digitizing equipment" isn't cheap. Just one big archival scanner can run $5000-$10,000 or more, and they had quite a few of those, probably specialized/customized.
I would guess a good portion of it, though not all, but that will probably take some time. As a non-profit that provides a widely used web service, they could probably always use more cash, so it's better to get donations now rather than waiting for their insurance to pay out. It's possible they were underinsured on some of this stuff; since they had a lot of custom hardware for scanning books, it may have been hard to price it accurately. It can also be a good fundraising call to arms; people who may have been on the fence or said "well, maybe I'll donate later" now have a reason to donate immediately.
Care to elaborate? Unless they are underinsured or did a poor job of estimating the value of their equipment, I don't understand why you are asserting that insurance wouldn't cover all losses. That's sort of what insurance is there for.
insurance is there to cover specific losses, not all losses. Opportunity costs, for example. Perhaps there will be extra labor involved in the recovery effort, this can go towards that.
In any case, it's somewhat moot, since a donor who is donating in the wake of this most likely doesn't mind if spillover from recovery costs goes into the program in general.
I'm not sure what opportunity cost there would be, considering that their digitizing operations are not revenue-generating. But I can see your general point, that even if all the physical repairs and goods are paid for by insurance there could still be some residual costs to be absorbed.
I understand that, but since scanning a document doesn't actually generate any revenue, I don't understand how there could be an opportunity cost associated with it.
Thanks to the headline, I finally remembered to set that up, too. I suspect that if they need anymore money after insurance and such, the most effective time is to fund raise immediately. Hopefully it doesn't happen again, but maybe that's a silver lining!
Slightly off topic, but I really like Crowdtilt's payment dialog. That was easily the lowest friction payment box I've seen. I wonder who designed it? Looking at their terms, it looks like they're using Balanced Payments, was it an internal design or inspired by some Balance Payments widget?
Thanks :). We designed it in-house. One of the great benefits of balanced and stripe is complete customizability of not only the look and feel, but also of which fields to include/leave.
