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Thanks for talking to us Brian.  Tell us a bit about Adtruism.

Well Adtruism is a social tech startup that let’s anyone with a website or blog effortlessly raise money for a good cause. Our system works by asking website owners to embed one of our icons on their site. The icon displays the name of the charity you're supporting as well as an area in which commercial advertisements are displayed. Every time your site gets viewed, companies pay a small amount to display their ad inside our icon and we direct 100% of that advertising revenue to the charity; so in a nutshell it's an effortless and costless way to support a cause you care about.

What inspired you to start the project?

Adtruism actually came from my own experience as a website owner. I had a small site with modest traffic and decided to monetize it by embedding some ads. When I checked my balance after a few weeks the ads had only made a couple of euro so I decided to direct the revenues to the Simon Community. Unfortunately it wasn't possible to do that so I hacked together a very rough working prototype of something that would. I posted the link on Facebook and the take-up was great so I knew there was a real need for it. I decided to stick with it and develop a proper version in my spare time while finishing my degree and then launched it just after my finals a few weeks ago.

How have businesses and industry Execs reacted to it?

The take-up has been pretty incredible, we've already signed up a huge chunk of Ireland's top websites and we'll be rolling out the icons to those sites over the coming few months. Our icons display their charitable motivation so what we've found is that people are far more likely to interact with our ads - and interestingly for publishers, people are actually paying more attention to other ads on these sites so they can boost their ad revenues as well.

The layered complexity of the ad agency landscape here in Ireland was a bit of a shock to the system but thankfully we've received a huge amount of good will from the various agencies that have helped us to understand and navigate it. Thanks to their support we're now looking forward to running some great campaigns for some top international brands over the coming weeks.

Have you any advice for other young people who want to start their own (or get involved with a) social tech company?

I'd definitely recommend going for it - it's the most tiring thing you'll ever do but it’s an incredible learning curve and it’s genuinely rewarding. In terms of more solid advice I'd suggest two things. Firstly, try to tie in with as many networks as possible (accelerators, meet-ups, funding programmes etc...) And talk to everybody you can because you never know what will come of it. Secondly, try your best to assemble a really strong board of advisors. If your startup is socially driven you should never be short of good will and a top quality board will not only add credibility to your company but you'll learn a huge amount from listening to them.

What's the most important thing you want to achieve in the next 5 years?

The long-term goal for Adtruism is to be an accepted form of internet etiquette for all publishers; big or small. Everyone is becoming more and more aware of how important it is to buy from, partner with, and work for companies that aren't purely driven by the bottom line - and communicating social values as a company is now hugely important. In the next five years I hope Adtruism can be a key part of this development and we have some really interesting new products that will help us to do that.

This article originally appeared in Newstalk Magazine for iPad in September, for more details go here.