How many marketers does it take to build a money site? We’re about to find out!
Our next ambitious project is to create a revenue-generating website that is built, managed, and grown by members of the Traffic Think Tank community.
Ambitious? Definitely. A project management nightmare? Probably.
But it’s all for a good cause. All of the website’s profits will be donated to Black Girls Code.
For those of you unaware of the charity, Black Girls Code, their goal is to increase the number of women of color in the digital space by empowering girls of color ages 7 to 17 to become innovators in STEM fields, leaders in their communities, and builders of their own futures through exposure to computer science and technology.
How will the project work?
Everyone involved in the project is doing so on a purely voluntary basis, and as of right now, we have around 40 members of the community that have committed some of their time to support the project.
Alongside the time of the community, the Traffic Think Tank founding team will be covering all of the costs associated with the systems and management of the project.
To begin with, we’ve assembled a smaller project team of community volunteers so that we can help settle on some early decisions, set up project management systems, and outline the first milestones for the website’s design and development. From there, we’ll be bringing more of the community volunteers into the project team.
The initial project team is comprised of:
- David Broderick (project management).
- Ronan Kelleher (project management).
- Liz Dougherty (project management).
- Kristin Tyndall (project management & content planning).
- Naila Turner (content planning).
- Joey Farruggio (design & development).
- Judd Lyon (development).
- Lukas Murdock (design & development).
- Matthew Howells-Barby, Nick Eubanks, and Ian Howells (the Traffic Think Tank founding team).
How will decisions be made?
When you’re running a community-driven project, clarity on how decisions will be made is critical. Any decision that influences the overall direction and growth of the project will be put to a wider community vote.
In fact, we’ve already done this with the decision around which charity we’ll donate all the profits to.
We’ll share more on this over time as we detail out a more structured decision-making framework.
What’s next?
The next step in our process is to decide upon which niche we’ll focus our efforts on, finalize branding, and then begin design and build. That’s when we’ll call upon a larger group of community volunteers so the real fun can begin!
We want this to be a living, breathing case study of both how to build a revenue-generating website, but also what it looks like to rally together a large community of volunteers from around the world to tackle an ambitious goal.
We’ll be sharing regular updates within the Traffic Think Tank community, as well as on the blog.
Stay tuned.