Midnight, 2 nights ago in Medellin, Colombia I came across a post on Tim Ferriss’ blog. He has been posting regularly recently and I haven’t had time to keep up, but this post caught my attention.

Tim was aiming to raise $100,000 to provide people around the world with clean drinking water. One of our most basic needs.

I happily donated $25.

Then, I though with the way my business is taking off this year and the success of my paleo recipe app, perhaps I can do more. I considered my blog’s eShop, and the 9,000 subscribers I could email.

I threw together a graphic from a pertinent screengrab from the video and put together a newsletter:

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I scheduled this to go out to my email list. I also scheduled the graphic to appear on Facebook and I would be tweeting about the charity initiative.

To keep people interested I gave them a benefit (10% discount, knowledge they would be giving to charity) and added a couple of new products to the eShop that were previously unavailable.

If people wished to donate directly, I gave them a link: http://bit.ly/water-aid-ferriss

The results

The bit.ly link received 35 clicks. Most of these came from our newsletter.

The newsletter to my main list was opened by 31% of subscribers and received 601 clicks to the eShop.

Through Facebook and Twitter we received a further 150 clicks. A few people questioned the whole “donating all profits” so I explained on Facebook that we really meant all profits and that everything would be going to charity. It’s interesting how much of a doubting mind people have about these things.

The eShop generated £566.38 in sales.

We have a 30% profit margin so that is £169.91 or $258.08.

All of which I’ll be sending over through Tim Ferriss’ donation drive.