Revenue Opportunities

Advertising can be a powerful earner for your association, but it needs to be carefully managed. A website blanketed in flashing banner adverts, pop-ups and other intrusive measures can turn off a lot of students, or give them the feeling that they are being in some way 'exploited' by their own association.

Gumbo is designed to draw as many students as possible to your website, principally to extend the reach of your association, and to encourage more of your students to take part. But from an advertising point of view as well, it's obviously essential to keep the site popular and heavily used.

That's why Gumbo uses a number of more subtle, integrated advertising methods to provide genuinely useful advertising to your students, provided in an unobtrusive way, which still allow you to take this opportunity to boost your association's finances.

• Traditional Advertising

  Gumbo includes an advert management system, using a traditional rotating banner ad method on key pages of the site. Views and click-throughs are tracked, allowing you to sell bundles of either. Individual campaigns can also be targeted towards specific groups of students, e.g. to target students in specific years, specific genders etc, significantly increasing the value of the advertising spaces on offer.

• Entertainment Listings

  Gumbo’s entertainment model has been designed to prioritise association events, but also to enable third party venues to gain secure access to update and maintain their own events listings. The system works using credits, either purchased in advance, or billed later, which can be exchanged for individual text-only adverts placed into the websites listings system. Such adverts are subsequently queued for approval by Association staff, who can then approve them and make them visible on the website.

  As well as generating revenue directly from the selling of such advertising, it provides the opportunity to turn your Entertainment section into a major traffic driver, potentially the first place students look when planning somewhere to go. With pride of place reserved for your own ents events, you’re guaranteed many more eyeballs looking at your own ents offering.

• Integrated Amazon® Shopping

  As an additional revenue booster, Gumbo includes an integrated Amazon shop providing Search and listings for all Amazon UK Books, Music, DVD and Games content. Students can browse a lightweight shop, totally integrated into your website. They can even add items to an integrated shopping basket. When done, they simply click the Checkout button and they are taken to Amazon’s checkout pages to enter their credit card details securely. No involvement is required on your part to maintain or manage the store, as the entire system is handled directly by Amazon.

  All purchases made via the store generate commission directly to your association of between 5 and 10% on each purchase, dependent on usage. Full reports are provided by Amazon on a regular basis.

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