this is a good day and we are extremely excited for the work we will be able to do together with all of you in the time to come! our country is in distress and millions have been affected. what can we do? we should do something? where? how? but we often find ourselves inactive, feeling unable to do anything sensible and we accept that again we were to no use. stop! this time we felt that there must be something we can do, after all, with such a great community as somewhere in... blog we are able to jointly mobilize. we have now provided a simple, but very transparent and efficient tool for serial donations. we can line up people and companies that are willing to donate in collaboration and hopefully raise a considerable amount for save the children´s work in the sidr disaster areas. the service should be well explained in the sticky notice board post. please also be patient with us if we have failed to clear out certain points. whatever done here is done in the very best intention, within the power, opportunities and limitations we have as an sms service provider. we have worked hard the last few days to get this system up and havent got much chance to test out the information part yet. as you, the blog community, are a part of somewhere in..., amader ghorer manush, we feel that your feedback good or bad, will help us improve our message and service to a level where we can take it to a much bigger participation level. work with us to spread the news, and we believe that this tool gives an opportunity to get on donors from micro to massive level to join, donors which might not have donated otherwise. you can also enlist as a donor. we help lining up the domino blocks, you trigger the chain reaction of donations! thanks to your engaged feedback, we have been able to see that some confusions could still be there, and we will try to answer the common questions below (bangla translation to follow soon): 1) is somewhere in... over-comitting itself to donate beyond its limit? we have listed our own companies; somewhere in..., escenic and aawaj as the first donors, while orion bread is our first external donor. we do of course have limited funds, but every donor will be able to set how much they will donate pr sms and how much will be their max limit. we will get new donors lined up to jump in with fresh funds once another donor has reached their limit. with this tool, we are probably willing to stretch our funds more for this cause than we would have had with a one time donation. in this case, the donors challenge you to give (with as many friends giving as possible) and they will give with you. 2) why only 1 sms? we feel that it is important to create awareness and to get as broad movement as possible. with one sms per person, we can get a much larger participation throughout the campaign. 3) why not donate instantly, why delay it through counting sms? save the children do have more funds than they can spend for the first few days/weeks. their problem is more logistics and reaching there. however, the more funds we can raise for them, the bigger reach they get and the more sustainable projects they can initiate for the victimized children. these people will need massive help for the next years, and this campaign could roll over a long time with your help. 4) why should the operators take a share of my sms? well, we are a sms provider and have been given opportunities but also limitations from the operators. we came up with this idea and got it started within 2-3 days, keeping the system loss at a minimum. this is the first day of this campaign, and we are already preparing info material for the operators, where we request them to support us by sending the money you pay for the sms directly to save the children. if you help make this a success, we stand a very good chance of getting the operators to join us so that the system loss goes to absolutely 0%. 5) how can people abroad help? be happy that we have manage to establish this local campaign, add the link to this post in every email you send to your friends in bangladesh and send your payment directly to save the children as explained on http://www.savethechildren.org/ 6) does anyone make money out of this for business? all donations from the donors will go directly to save the children, and not through us. the break up of the sms charge is as such: the operators normally keep 1.2 tk, somewhere in... gets 0.8 tk and the government gets 0.3 tk in vat. a) operators 1.2 tk: we started by applying the existing commercial agreement with them not to loose time, and we really believe that we will be able to get them forward your 1.2 tk to the relief work so that they in the end do not profit from this. b) somewhere in...s 0.8 tk: we have already committed a bigger amount per sms to save the children, so we are giving with you. we will also keep forwarding these 0.8 tk to the campaign after we reach our own donation limit for the entire period, so that not a single paisa is kept. c) governments 0.3tk: we will not try to negotiate on this. anyway the government will need all the revenue it can get to rebuild the country. 7) how to donate more than 2 tk? please do donate directly to any organisation you feel is spending the money wisely. besides that, do inform all your friends to join the campaign, so that your recommendation triggers even more donations. probably you interact with 10-100 different people every day in normal conversations, so use every opportunity to get your friends and family to join in. we have thousands of registered bloggers, and if each blogger tells everyone they meet we get a chain reaction, without this having to cost you extra money. 8) why only one project? somewhere in... has offices just below save the children, we highly respect them for their noble work for distressed children and we though that we can join in with them. if this becomes a success, our tool can be made into a multiple cause service where we can enlist several causes and both you and the donors can choose which one to support. for the local community by the local community. if you still have any confusion, please raise these issues and we will be here with you to explain. if we have failed to see certain issues, your feedback will be extremely important to ensure a fair and efficient campaign. we, the whole blog family, are all wanting to do something good for the victims. here is an attempt to reach out far, be with us the whole journey to bring smiles back to the faces of traumatized and distressed children.