Folks, several weeks ago a company approached me saying that they could offer me SMS facilities and services to help fund my website.

As you know I work full time and AfricanCrisis is the hobby that consumes the rest of my non-working life. Its not fun burning the candle at both ends all the time, year in and year out. I’ve been doing this for 5 years, and I’ll continue doing this until I drop dead – because I want to and I believe in it! But it would be nice if I could be financially independent again so that I can focus on this site completely with all my energy instead of just part time.

You will also note that AfricanCrisis does not run on commercially available software except for the bulletin board. There are many reasons for this. I am loathed to go that path because as a programmer I can create and experiment with features and try to find new features which can give the website an edge over others. (Note: There is more to AfricanCrisis than just what is available to the public. It has customised features inside it available only to me or the Volunteers). I want to keep on experimenting with features and concepts in the future too. That’s the kind of stuff I want to do in the badly needed rewrite of the site which I will start in December. The site has not had a true make-over in the 5 years of its existence and it needs it badly. Plus, its ready to fall apart due to volumes! (Example: My news page is about 3 weeks away from crashing when we hit news article no; 10,000 – because I only catered for 9,999 when I designed it in 2001. I figured that would last me 10 years – now we’re at the end of 5 years and we’ve reached that limit! Oops! So I need to quickly fix that before the site falls over horribly one morning!)

I do want to remind people that the few adverts you see on AfricanCrisis are NOT PAID FOR. I do not get ANY advertising revenue. I put up adverts for people I support or who once supported me and those ads are free.

Now that I’ve completely the other tasks, such as the Straight Talk Affiliate scheme which was a little initiative to try to make a bit of money while at the same time throwing it open to other websites who want to use it (GPSA, and The Right Perspective are among those using it) I want to try this SMS experiment.

We will start off in a simple manner. This company has offered me these facilities completely free – except there is a transaction fee. That obviously is their interest – which is fine, since I believe in Free Market capitalism.

So what I want to try to do are some simple experiments to see how interested people are in these features and what suggestions people can come up with. I would like to ultimately find some kind of formula that brings in money which I can use initially to get me back on my feet as a one-man business, and then from there, to turn this into something genuinely bigger – long term – we look at this concept of a proper organisation. But you can’t start an organisation if you have no capital, etc. So if I can’t support myself… how am I going to create an organisation?

I would like to turn AfricanCrisis from being my hobby into being my full time occupation. I need to play various roles in it. We have volunteers who are willing to help and that has been a success. But one needs to go further. You need to structure the work, etc so that the volunteers can function within a properly organised system. I did create such a thing, very simplistically in the background some months back, and it was a huge success. But we need much more sophisticated stuff, and one needs more of my time so I can liaise with the various people too. Even further down the line, one would like to hire staff.

What we have here is a part-time newspaper, but in the long term we need funding to become a valid organisation that can compete with other organisations and can even further down the line exert real influence politically, etc. So there’s a long path ahead. But none of it can happen without solving the funding problems. If I can’t even pay my own salary… how could I start something serious?

Furthermore, if one were to get one source of money, one could be “bought” and “controlled” by whoever is giving that money. I need to retain the independence of attitude that I’ve had all along and so seeking out individual people or organisations to fund me is not on. I would rather have something with a broader base because that gives me the greatest freedom to continue saying and doing what I think is in our best interests.

So what I want to do with the SMS’s is first test the concept. There is a lot one can do with it. I spoke to the company owner, went over their manuals, and he’s put a lot of ideas in my head which I will describe to you below.

There is an up and down side to SMS funding. The smaller the amounts of the SMS’s the more is taken by the networks and the companies that handle the SMS. I initially wanted SMS’s which cost only R1.50. But of the R1.50, I only get 28% – i.e. 42c. I feel too uncomfortable asking for amounts of R7.50, R10.00 or bigger.

So for the experiment, we will have 2 numbers. One for R3 and one for R5. On R3, I will get 40.8% = R1.22 and on the R5 I will get 46.7% = R2.33.

The service I will set up, as a bit of a test is this: If you send an SMS to this number: 35072 – it will cost you R3.00.

If you send SMS to 36009 then whatever MESSAGE you put inside the text, will be displayed on AfricanCrisis immediately, without any censorship whatsoever. My logic was that if someone sent an SMS and made that payment that he could say whatever he wanted. I will of course expect abuse. But I will say that I cannot be held responsible for what is said. Note, I will have the number of the cell phone that sent that SMS! Just a warning to those who may be thinking of abusing it!

So that is the experiment we will try.

But, there are other things one can do, and here I’d like to throw some ideas around.

I can send out SMS’s too – much cheaper than one normally can (25c an SMS). We could use this to: Send people SMS alerts when AfricanCrisis is updated. Or even send out important notices of some kind or even an abbreviation of some news item. The bottom line is – the website could send out SMS’s.

Is there any constructive way we can use this???

I sat and wondered if there was some facility I could develop which would:-
(a) Serve a valid business purpose to help our visitors.
(b) Also help to generate income for me.

If we could do the above, it would be perfect… you get a benefit and so do I.

One idea I had was allowing people to send SMS’s from the website. You buy some air time, and then you can set up a little address book and you can send off SMS’s from the site for, say, 35c per SMS. So by using my SMS facility, I would make 10c on each SMS you send, plus I save you a good few cents in return. That’s one possibility.

Given that this website is a place for Ex-Pats and people inside SA, I have wondered many times if there is some way of helping to bring everyone together. For example: Perhaps people overseas need to contact someone in SA urgently, but an email won’t do – so they need to send an SMS to that person. Thus someone overseas could then buy airtime, using, for example, US Dollars, but send an SMS to anyone in SA!

Now… can we do the opposite? Can we allow people in SA to send a cell phone message to someone in the USA or the UK?? I don’t know. But I saw that Paypal now can handle Cell phone PAYMENTS! Does anyone have knowledge of sending messages to cell phones from the Internet where the cell phones are outside Africa?

Other suggestions from this company were:-
1. Run SMS polls. Let people send SMS’s and vote on something and display the results.

2. Run SMS auctions and competitions. This gets really interesting. We could auction off something. (We’d have to decide WHAT).

I’ve now familiarised myself with the web aspect of the SMS’s and its interaction with the cell phones and its pretty sophisticated. Basically from a cell phone you can send a message which comes to a progam of mine and that program can then intelligently look at the message and decide to do something. This leaves us with unlimited possibilities.

For example, what if we offered group SMS’ing? One person sends an SMS, and it goes to the program and the program then SMS’s either that same message or another message to a group of people?

I did hit on the idea of “Anonymous” SMS’ing – where someone sends an SMS and it is rerouted to someone else thereby hiding the source. But I think that is just gonna be one big recipe for TROUBLE!! So I won’t go there.

I’ve not looked into WAP possibilities yet.

Is there some way we can use the power of AfricanCrisis and tie it up to some existing business and service which is mutually beneficial for everyone?

What I am thinking of too, is taking whatever idea works, and looking at adding that into the StraightTalk Affiliate Scheme THEREBY MAKING IT AVAILABLE TO OTHER WEB AND BLOG OWNERS WHO WANT TO USE IT – so that we have that synergy… so that whatever works for AfricanCrisis ALSO can be made to work for OTHER website and blog owners who want to use it.

The ultimate would be if we could figure out ways of dealing with the DISTANCES. I have a suspicion – and I’ve had this from the day I created this website – that at some point – the fact that we live in DIFFERENT COUNTRIES far apart could one day be turned from a bad thing into a GOOD THING – that we can come up with some idea which will help people. We have so much interaction between people in SA and outside SA and with each other across the world – there must be some kind of need or service we could fulfill to help each other.

I would love to draw funding from a VALID BUSINESS SERVICE.

But maybe one can have Religious and even Political services coming out of it?

One idea that company owner reckoned works like a charm is the auction/competition idea. He was telling me about someone in S.Africa who actually auctions a brand new car at a time! (see: Click here for: SMSAuctions). However, I’d have to investigate the legal implications and ensure that I don’t run foul of the law. He said that there shouldn’t be problems as long as I don’t collect money on BEHALF OF A CHARITY. For that you have to follow a proper procedure.

I wondered if we could auction or run competitions for books or other items. What of memorabilia?

A negative I always had, for example, was selling books, like Government by Deception and others to people overseas. The postage costs are HORRIFIC. Many people overseas have asked me for an autographed copy of my book. So what if I put up a little competition which results in me giving away some autographed books AND paying the airmail postage overseas?

OR… are there other things we could sell or do? What of memorabilia and flags? I know someone who sells real memorabilia – the former flags – even Boer Vierkleur or Rhodesian flags – etc. What if we ran regular competitions?

Could we sell other things with broader appeal?
Could we sell things that could HELP PEOPLE?
Could run a competition/raffle for items that could help people be SAFE? e.g. Annual subscription to the service of a security company?
What of such a competition/raffle and the beneficiary is a farmer? (i.e. to pay for his costs for security for a year?)

What of some kind of SMS advertising campaign for like-minded people?

The list goes on and on.

I’m going to throw this around as food for thought. I’m busy developing the first phase of the experiment. If anyone has ideas, then let’s talk about it. Drop it on the Contact us page with your contact details.

I have a lot of ideas for AfricanCrisis, but most of them are highly dependent on VOLUME. As our VOLUME of visitors arise, so many ideas can then become workable. e.g. Free or low-cost classified adverts for people. We’re slowly but surely getting there with the current growth of the site. But I’d like to try this idea as an opener because SMS’sing seems to be a big thing. Jan.