Last night I was reading around on the internet and came across the Charity Water campaign that Cameron Moll has been running to celebrate Authentic Jobs’ 5 year anniversary. It’s not the first I’d heard of it, but it was the first time I paid much attention to it.

I was instantly taken by two things:

• What a great cause Charity Water is.
• That despite being backed by some of the biggest names in our industry, the camapign had still only netted just over half of the goal amount of 20k.

I hatched an idea in about 2 minutes to donate our daily earnings to the cause. I threw together a quick temp campaign page, and Brian assembled it. We hacked some code at the top of all our app pages that would display the promo once to each of the site visitors. We also followed up with the usual couple tweets, and a blog post to talk about the idea.

Decent idea?

We’re a small niche app studio. We count good days when we get hundreds of dollars in new subscriptions, not thousands. We knew this wouldn’t make a ton of money for the charity… But how much has it made so far you ask?

zero dollars.

We’re about four hours in, and not only has nobody signed up for a paid account, but our signup rate for free accounts is about a third of normal rate from what we can tell…

So what’s up? Was it a bad idea? Are we ignoring some bit of human psychology? Did the campaign popup scare everyone off?