Banner Towing Policy

What is Banner Towing?

Most CFO Community (and digest) readers realize that CFO is a direct link to a clearly targeted audience: an audience that owns or cares about a Cardinal and is willing to do what's required to fly safely, have fun and save a few dollars.

A few of these readers have products or services that they would like to peddle to our readers. From time to time they may slip some self-promotion into the conversation. Such self-promotion of a commercial enterprise within CFO's Community is what we are calling banner towing.

Our members often discuss which product may be best, or which service they prefer. Such personal opinions and recommendations are not banner towing. At times there can be a fine line when a customer becomes unusually and repeatedly enthusiatic about a supplier.

CFO Policy

In general we discourage banner towing. The Community is not a place for rampant advertisements, and we believe our readers expect the forum to be free of such commercialism.

There are a few exceptions to this limitation:

CFO Sponsors. It's ok if a CFO sponsor wishes to advise the digest readership of a special opportunity from time to time. We like CFO discounts, special deals for CFO members and benefits for CFO membership. As long as these are tasteful and appropriate we let 'em run.

Messages from sponsors are often a reply to a concern or additional data in the sponsor's area of expertise. There is a real benefit to having experts in the digest, and we benefit from the input of these experts. CFO sponsor products and services solve problems, that's a good thing.

CFO sponsors are engaged in a bi-directional relationship with CFO. Just anyone can't become a sponsor, we limit sponsorship to companies who we know are good, trustworthy companies, to the best of our ability. They help us and we help them.

CFO is in part funded by our sponsors, and we like having sponsors. If you are a commercial entity with a service or product to offer to our readers, talk to us about sponsorship. If we are a fit for each other, we have a range of sponsorship options, almost certainly one of them will fit your needs better than banner towing.
Charities or public services. We hear from a variety of benevolent organizations who help those in need. Angle Flight comes to mind and there are others. Within appropriate limits we support information on these kinds of organizations.
Recommendations. Please note that someone not really banner towing. If a CFO reading customer wants to recommend a product or service, well, that's what it's all about. No problem.

If you are a commercial operation considering doing some promotion, just make a CFO member happy enough to want to write in about it!
Exceptions. From time to time things just seem right to run. Either it's borderline and 'feels' ok, or we think there is redeeming virtue beyond clear definition.

Most of these categories, actually all of them, refer to some degree of discretion being applied. Who's discretion? Quite simply, the discretion of the editor: Paul for the digest, Keith for the Community. We discuss special cases from time to time.

Overall we're here to have a good time and maintain the positive and mutually benefitial culture of CFO. Our policies are meant to support rather than limit the exchange of information.

But we do retain the right to edit as we see fit to serve the long term best interests of CFO.