Hello, all members. This is our final planning essay. The rest of this essay is copy-pasted from our working group pms (2 & 3).
To start, when JtC wrote his 'for sale' essay he mentioned in the comments that someone had pointed out $5 a month per user would carry the site, but the response had been tepid. I believe he was referring to this comment. When I wrote that comment I was envisioning total costs that would include a decent living for JtC. My gut and experience had already told me C99 had taken over JtC's personal and business life. In addition, that amount would let him pay part-time wages to Joe, and to not worry over whether he can afford a server upgrade.
As you can see, $5 X 2K is $10K monthly. JtC's decision to set the necessary minimum at $4K monthly should be only a jumping-off point for our eventual goals, but we'd better start there, because $2 monthly per average user is absolutely doable. Once we've done that, we can set about rescuing JtC's and Joe's grandkids from having to go to school wearing hand-me-downs. Having looked at the numbers, we need to discuss how to achieve those goals, & why mandatory subscriptions are off-limits.
Summing up where we are: We need to self-fund the blog by subscription. Subscriptions MUST be voluntary. We don't expect to achieve self support through subscription immediately, but it is always our primary goal. Our two tasks as a team will be to raise the funds we need, by several different methods, and to show every blog member ways she or he can meet a two dollar-a-month commitment, whatever their grim circumstances. Yes, being poor is grim. It isn't just relatively grim. I've been poor financially, all my life, and there are members here who are definitely poorer than me.
What makes our goal possible (this is a new thing) is the big, personal, real-world sacrifice JtC is making with that $4K/m figure. Every member (once we show them how) can come up with that amount and will want to. By the time --probably well before-- we've persuaded and assisted every member to feel equally franchised, through cancellable subscriptions, we'll be pulling in more than $4K/m. So from the very beginning, our essays should emphasize our goal of all-voluntary subscriptions, with a bottom commitment of $2/m, while we cheerfully accept every other donation as well.
Everybody, take a long look and say what you think. We are spread over 9 time zones; we'll make sure we all get a chance to do back-and-forth. If 24 hours isn't enough time for one of us, let the rest know and we'll lengthen it.
To the whole team, I'm sorry, my bad. I should have reiterated the position we're agreed on, for the benefit of new team members and members who haven't been able to follow all our deliberations so far. We are going to interpret 'voluntary subscription' very widely, and that is going to be one of our tools to reach 'total subscription commitment' from all members.
Housekeeping & Scheduling
We've already exceeded the site group pm capacity to accomodate us all. We now have two off-site locations for our fundraising team to meet and work. We anticipate publishing 3 more fundraising essays in the last week of August. On September 6th, we'll be able to publish whatever part of JtC's data to us we decide to share publicly. Whatever dohicky we pick to exhibit that info would be displayed in each of our fundraising essays, and would be revised at the start of each month.
If you would like to contribute, the donation button is at the top right of this page.(H/T to JnH)