I wanted to that this opportunity to tell you of a change we are making on the site since you will begin to see small advertisements on COPD360social. It is very expensive to run a site like this. We have to pay for the platform we use, and have to pay a full time IT person to keep the platform current, make new improvements and to keep the site running. When we launched the site a little over a year ago, we had no idea how successful it would become. Since the launch thousands of people have joined and have found value in what we had to offer
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Very little of our operating funds for the Foundation come from the COPD community, and we must mostly rely on grants to fund our programs. It was always our intent to find sponsorships for the site through grants and although we have received some grant funding, we have not received enough to pay for all the associated expenses. It has now become clear that in order to continue providing the value that COPD360social offers our community, we had to seek funds, and the only way to do that was to sell ads on the site. With this realization we decided that if ads had to appear on the site they would in no way be placed in such a way that they interfered with the content and that we would not consider using pop-up ads. The ads you will see will be placed outside the content area like the ad for our initial sponsor Inova. In no way will the ads ever interfere with your viewing of content. It is our hope that by allowing advertising on the site, we can guarantee the quality educational and social experience you have come to expect from COPD360 for a long time to come.
We want to emphasize that these changes were necessary to continue our work. We hope you understand the reasons for the ads and will continue to be valued members of our community. If you have any thoughts or concerns, please feel free to contact me at wclark@copdfoundation.org. We appreciate your understanding.