Sponsoring Community Projects

Sponsoring community projects through Placerama is a way of showing your community that you care and that you trust them to decide where your contribution should go.

Jump to the payment button now or read more about it first.

• How do I become a sponsor?
• How do I pay?
• Where does the money go?
• What do I get in return?
• Can I see where my money went?
• What does Placerama get out of it?
• How can I have more control over where my money goes?

Q. How do I become a sponsor?

A. Becoming a community sponsor involves making a payment into a virtual fund situated at your location. You can imagine it as a virtual bucket of money sitting in your home or business. You'll also need to register and provide a location for your profile.

Q. How do I pay?

A. All payments are handled through PayPal. Using PayPal you can pay either with a credit card or funds in your PayPal account.

Q. Where does the money go?

A. The money you put into the local fund gets allocated to anyone who asks for it based on votes from your community, where the voters are and how much the recipient is asking for. This allocation happens at the end of each calendar month.

Note: Funds are stored in separate pools for each currency and recipients will request funds in a specific currency as well, so it's important to choose the appropriate currency for your payment.

Read more about asking for funding here

Q. What do I get in return?

A. As a sponsor you get greater visibility on Placerama to other Placerama visitors near you depending on how much you contribute and how far away you are from those people. For example, ABC Bank a kilometre away from Fred contributes $1000 and gets top billing on the site for most people in the area. However, when Fred visits Placerama he sees that Joe's Workshop (just down the road from him) gets top sponsor billing on the site because of their contribution of $100.

Depending on your ranking as a sponsor, you will get featured on Placerama in a number of ways:

• If you are the top sponsor in the vicinity of a visitor to the site, you will be featured as the Top Local Sponsor at the top of all site pages they visit with a link to your public profile page.
• If you are one of the top five local sponsors you will be featured in a list on the home page.
• You will also be listed in a full list of local sponsors linked to from the home page.
• If you have contributed to a community project, you will be listed as a sponsor on the listing page for that project.

We will also be encouraging members of the community who vote for a project to support the local businesses who are contributing the funding.

Q. Can I see where my money went?

A. On the public profile page for each listing that has been allocated funds, each sponsor who contributed to that project is listed as a contributor with a link to their public profile page. Also, any projects that you have contributed to will be listed on your public profile page.

Q. What does Placerama get out of it?

A. Placerama retains 5% of the funds contributed, PayPal charges total fees of around 5%, but the balance (around 90%) is allocated to community projects.

Q. How can I have more control over where my money goes?

A. The main purpose of becoming a Placerama sponsor is to let your community decide what projects are worthy of funding. If you see a project on Placerama that you would like to fund directly, you can contact the project coordinator via email. However, if you contribute funds through Placerama you will receive ongoing exposure on the site as a community sponsor.

If you (or anyone else) feel that a project asking for funds is not legitimate, please contact us and we will investigate. In the event that we discover that a recipient has misrepresented themselves or the project they are requesting funding for, we will remove the listing.

In addition, if you have any concerns about how our distribution algorithm is working, please let us know so we can improve it.

For more details on our terms and conditions for sponsors and recipients, click here.

Become a sponsor