Would this work to raise money for a nonprofit cause?

Excellent idea.

It probably is against the advertisers’s Terms of Service. :)
And I wouldn’t call it ethically responsible either.

@vincnett, Why not?

Everyone involved would know what was going on.

Yes, but the people are volunteering to get spammed. It’s perfectly ethical.

Exactly.

Spam me please! It’s for a good cause! I spend all my time reading catalogs anyway, hours each week. Crap looks much better with an ad around it. I do remove the tags from things I waste my money on though. Too bad they don’t sell things with an ad for it glued on it.

That’s actually a pretty cool idea, but you would need to make sure that the sponsors who were going to be emailing the stuff out were selling good, legitimate products and services, people are so sick of viagra spam it isn’t funny, and sending people who have just done a charitable action a phishing email probably wouldn’t be the best thing.

Legitimate advertisers expect a return on the money they spend for an ad, so I think it would be difficult to get advertisers.

I’ve seen publications from non profits that are full of ads, space which was sold to generate money for the non profit. Seems comparable to that I think.

You can do a very similar thing by utilizing google adsense or by setting up an amazon affiliate program (people shop amazon by first linking through your site.) I know that some public radio stations (like WBUR) have started to do the latter.
The one problem with the method that you suggest is that the advertisers are essentially sending “spam” to parties that are not very likely to respond to it (you usually do not respond to messages if you know that they are spam mail.) Therefore the return on the advertising agreement will be quite minimal for the advertising company, because if people do not accept the spam messages, the ad clients will not have increased revenue and the advertisers will take a loss. The only way that I could see something like this being taken up by an advertising firm is with a “points” type referral program (like the “you have won a free ipod” things.) In this sort of agreement the nonprofit group would only get the money if people actually were accepting the “deals” offered in the advertisements that they were receiving… but this is also super annoying.
so ya, either google adsense or amazon affiliate program

@monsoon – I mean not ethically responsible because you’re cheating on the advertisers. I bet that everybody who volunteers to receive spam doesn’t do so with the intention of even so much as looking at the emails, so there wouldn’t really be that much profit in it for advertisers. They’d be better off giving a normal donation ;-)