Looking on Charity Water's site, backing out the math, your per-week cost is a little less than $0.02? If you're looking to mimic to some small extent the success of FreeRice.com you're going to want to make the action trivial - looking at that puzzle makes me want to go away, where clicking a definition on FreeRice is easy, right or wrong. If you want clicks / click traffic / impressions ($), make it easy to click.
Great point; I was hoping my per-action cost to be around $0.09, which is roughly 10 times FreeRice's (pre-increase) cost of 10 grains, since it takes awhile to solve a sudoku puzzle.
Do you have any ideas on what would be a good single click or trivial action? I don't want to copy FreeRice outright, but I am having trouble brainstorming for other activities for the user. Perhaps a quiz about water cleanliness?
You could do something with high/low to bet if a water temp is going to be hotter or colder than a starting temp if you wanted to make it a game of chance. You could do something as basic as rock/paper/scissors, or tic tac toe. Pick n games that are that simple, simplify your sodoku to 1/9th the size, do multivariate / a/b testing to see how the CTR is for each game and let the traffic/users decide.
FreeRice is also nice because the domain is short =) although it looks like free/clean water/h2o variations are squatted (as far as instantdomainsearch.com knows) - good luck!
When someone makes a mistake, instead of just showing Sorry! Unfortunately, your sudoku solution was not correct. Please try again! and taking them to a new puzzle, you should point out the error.
When someone completes a puzzle, in addition to Congratulations! You've solved a sudoku puzzle successfully and helped provide a weeks worth of clean water. you should provide some random statistic about clean water in the world and perhaps how well you're doing relative to other players.
The scoring system doesn't work either (or perhaps you were expecting cookies to be enabled without mentioning it)?
Yeah, unfortunately cookies are required for the site to track your contributions. Most people nowadays have cookies enabled so I think it should be okay, but good for you that you're very security and privacy conscious. Thanks again for the feedback, it's much appreciated.