How can I help the Cloth Nappy Tree community?

Cloth Nappy Tree is constantly growing and expanding (we love adding new stuff!) and as it has become more popular, we now need your help to make Cloth Nappy Tree better. The team is still very small (and very busy) so we would love more people to join the fun and help realise our objectives for Cloth Nappy Tree.

The good news is there are many ways that you can help with Cloth Nappy Tree and you don’t necessarily have to be a cloth nappy expert! If you have some time and good will, you can really help!

› Suggestions

• Use Cloth Nappy Tree

  It may seem obvious, but Cloth Nappy Tree members are really great contributors: they send us emails full of positivity and enthusiasm about the site, which makes us want to work harder for you! Send us great suggestions, bug reports, and fan Cloth Nappy Tree on Facebook to spread the word. Take a look around Cloth Nappy Tree and tell us what you really think!

• Help the community

  Support other members on the forums and meet other Cloth Nappy Tree members.

• Write reviews and articles

  This is the core of Cloth Nappy Tree. Writing good informative articles and reviews about cloth nappies and parenting in general really helps people make informed decisions about their parenting and environmentally friendly product choices.

• Learn more about Cloth Nappy Tree and get involved

  You can subscribe to some of the forum RSS feeds to receive the latest Cloth Nappy Tree posts, classifieds, reviews or news straight to you favourite RSS reader. For example, subscribe to the Your ideas for Cloth Nappy Tree RSS feed to stay tuned about the latest ideas for new features. If you have an idea to make Cloth Nappy Tree better or find something broken, please do tell us. You can almost guarantee that if it makes your experience better, then it will do so for others

• Spread the word about Cloth Nappy Tree

  Write an original blog post about Cloth Nappy Tree on your blog or website. Or if you see an article about Cloth Nappy Tree on someone else's page, let us know! We love to hear about what other people think.

• Start a blog at Cloth Nappy Tree

  If you have an interesting topic to discuss or share, start a blog at Cloth Nappy Tree. We would love to hear from you and see you share your projects with others.

• Marketing

  Marketing is incredibly useful to Cloth Nappy Tree and for getting the use of cloth nappies more widely accepted: improving Cloth Nappy Tree's image on various websites (facebook, twitter, etc.), contacting journalists to let them know about the project, spread the word on blogs, websites, magazines, etc. Currently there are no marketing people in the team, you could make a big impact!

• Submit suggestions and improvements

  You can tell us what we can do to improve Cloth Nappy Tree in the Your Ideas for Cloth Nappy Tree forum.

› A bit about funding

• Donate

  Cloth Nappy Tree is a non profit making project designed to help people make informed decisions about their impact on the environment. Everyone involved in the project does so out of love. Of course running the site costs real money, so donations are very much appreciated. All funds from donations and advertising are used for the development of Cloth Nappy Tree: marketing, design, site improvements, hosting, bandwidth etc. You can donate money to our paypal account here:
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› Site Supporters

• Deed or Donate

  If you've done something to support the site or our charitable activities, we hope we can say thank you properly. You can become a site supporter if you've done something significant to help out such as regularly organising activities, taking part in admin, moderation, marketing, deeds of charity and wonderful good nature, donations, are a current advertiser/shop owner and lots more. In short anyhing that keeps us going, improving and doing good works. We don't want to incentivise Site Support by offering you rewards, so we won't bore you with great long lists. We do however try to give site supporters and business site supporters some extra things that we just haven't the resources to give all members. Hopefully they make using the site easier and more productive and for business you may be interested to note that your creations will be given more exposure throughout this site. Please do let us know if you've done something for the site or a charity through this site, even if it's in the past, we'd be mortified if you got left out.

  For those interested in the mechanics. It works on a degressive points system. So if for example you donated an object for a charity sale you might be credited with 3 months worth of Site Support points. Those points decrement each day until they eventually reach zero at which time the system automatically removes Site Supporter status. The rate of decrement is purposely set low. Whilst we encourage good deeds and a mutually supportive environment, we dont want to force people to be doing it constantly. The odd good deed every so often is more than enough for us, but do please do more if you can and can spare the time :).

• Support the Supporters

  Site Supporters provide provide a lot of help and a large proportion of the funding to keep this site running and improving for everyone. Visit their websites and show them some love if you can :). Site Supporters have baby blue user names throughout most of the site.

› Suggestions for Businesses and Shops

• Advertising

  Advertising revenue is extremely important to Cloth Nappy Tree. Many thanks go to our advertisers who help pay for our hosting and development costs. You can find out more about helping us and yourself by visiting the partner page or contacting us here.

• Marketing

  Tell people about Cloth Nappy Tree and the creations you have placed on it. When you do this you're not just helping us, but also yourself and your fellow entrepreneurs. Please help us create a supportive and vibrant creative community by treating it as such and respecting and promoting the beauty and effort others put into their work.

• Forum Sponsorship

  Shops with relevant products can now sponsor individual forums. Again, revenue from Forum Sponsorship goes towards helping Cloth Nappy Tree help others use cloth nappies. Contact us for more information.

• Shops and Web Site Support

  In real life our primary business is website and database support for various commercial people. As a result we have access to a lot of knowledge, skills, automation and infrastructure. We would like to use that to help small businesses with environmentally friendly products get off the ground. We are pleased to be able to offer presentable, ad free and reasonably priced shop web sites to regular members. Please contact us if you are looking for a shop solution and are a business trading below your country's value added tax threshold, with fewer than 3 employees and your inventory comprises mostly of environmentally friendly products. We sincerely believe that the help we can give you is significantly more presentable and way better value than you will find from any entry level commercial deal elsewhere.

› Suggestions for technical people

• Usability

  Usability is very important for us. If you can write html, css or even php or javascript: discuss, suggest or submit a new user interface or usability improvement.

• Look and feel

  If you’re a rock star designer, then you must be shocked by some bits of the Cloth Nappy Tree user interface. Why not help us by making Cloth Nappy Tree look better?

• Security review

  If you like to delve into code to look for security issues, please do so, and tell us about any problem you can find or suggestion on how to make Cloth Nappy Tree more secure.

• New Features

  If you would like to get involved with coding or design, or even take on a project of your own that you feel fits in with our goals for the site, please contact us.

› Do you need guidance?

Our time is limited as we are a very small team and we think of Cloth Nappy Tree as a community. If you’re willing to put some time and energy into Cloth Nappy Tree, we would love to help you get started. If you have any questions or if you need some guidance, feel free to contact us.