Posted by Carolin Silbernagl, Co-Founder and CEO, dotHIV

Editor's note: In honor of World AIDS Day, today we hear from Carolin Silbernagl, Co-Founder and CEO of dotHIV, a charity and domain registry that supports AIDS organizations by selling .hiv web addresses.

In the 1980s, when the death toll from AIDS and HIV-related illnesses began to mount, the end of AIDS was impossible to imagine. Three decades later, thanks to medical breakthroughs and the diligent work of activists, wiping out AIDS is no longer just a dream. At dotHIV, we raise money for AIDS organizations by selling the .hiv extension to nonprofits and businesses. Through a simple redirect, .hiv domains work as second entrance doors to existing websites: yourdomain.hiv then leads to the same homepage as yourdomain.com. And for each click on any type of .hiv URL, we donate money to HIV/AIDS charities.
The dotHIV team
The idea behind dotHIV came about in 2009, when a few friends in the advertising industry were working on a pro bono campaign for HIV prevention. We had grown tired of the usual approach of putting up posters and shooting TV commercials and thought: why not place our message in a space that people look at every time they open a web browser — and raise money at the same time? Their agency offered to let us borrow office space and software to get the idea off the ground, but as our footprint grew globally with employees and volunteers around the world, we realized we needed better tools to help us collaborate from our many remote locations. That’s when we turned to Google Apps. We were already familiar with the tools and knew how powerful they could be in helping us work faster and more efficiently, and since it’s free to nonprofits, we focus less on operations and more on getting out the word about dotHIV.

Google Apps is at the heart of everything we do. We have full-time employees, part-time volunteers, an advisory board, business angels and sponsors, located across four continents, so it’s essential to have tools that make our remote team feel like a real team. We hold daily standup meeting using Google Hangouts, so we get to see each other face-to-face consistently (and to remind us that we’re in this together). We write up and revise all our website content from a Google Doc, so each stakeholder can add recommendations and changes as comments or suggested edits rather than editing directly in a silo and emailing their version as an attachment. Project timelines live in Google Sheets, which are updating constantly, so no matter what time zone you’re in, we know where we stand in a process.

Once we create documents and presentations, we store them in Google Drive so we have access anytime we need them, from any device. We’re also using Drive to build up an archive of photos and videos that tell the dotHIV story.

We’ve even tapped into Google Cloud Platform to build new features for our website. For example, we used App Engine to create a click counter that will appear on every web page with a .hiv address. Whenever someone clicks on these pages, it triggers a small donation to an AIDS support group, with the funds coming from our domain registrations.

We started dotHIV with a small group of believers. Today, we’re a global network of experts who are using our diverse experience to support the fight against AIDS, and who are hopeful that the end of AIDS is in sight.