It’s the final countdown
The clock runs out on our crowdfunding tonight. Here’s how we’re doing
It seems like no time at all since we hit the big red button on our month of funding, but the clock is ticking and our month is almost up.
Right now, it’s looking like we’ll hit our target of funding 10 out of 10 journalists (yay!), but we haven’t yet claimed the full $100,000 from Craig Newmark and the News Integrity Initiative. Those grants work by matching your support, which means every dollar counts for double.
The grants don’t have a deadline, so you could pledge $10 next week and we’d get $20, but of course it’s good for us if we’ve got as much as we can before the clock runs out tonight. Lots of people and publications are keeping a close eye on us, and we want them to see that this model works.
WikiTribune by the numbers
We’re all about being open and honest, so here’s some of the data on the support we’ve received so far, pulled directly from the Stripe account (currently PayPal isn’t included — our friends at Baremetrics are working on that).
These figures are in GBP, because that’s the currency on our Stripe account.
Your support, on average
The average WikiTribune supporter (blended between subscriptions and one-offs) pledges:
That’s about 7 spiral-bound reporters’ notebooks.
Monthly support
Here’s what we’re looking to receive every month from ongoing monthly support (subscriptions).
In a standard month (31 days), that works out to about £44 of support every hour, 24 hours a day. Which makes us feel pretty loved.
Overall support
And here’s what we’ve received so far in total. Remember, this is just from Stripe, it doesn’t include PayPal and it also doesn’t include the ESV grant or the two matching grants.
If we convert 102357 to hex colour code, it comes out as very dark blue. At least we’re not in the red, right?
What now?
Our initial campaign finishes at midnight tonight. If we receive the last bit of support we need to fund the tenth journalist (it’ll say 10/10 on our homepage), we’ll declare the campaign a success and WikiTribune is go. If not, we’ll be refunding everyone, as per our promise.
After that, you’ll still be able to support WikiTribune with one-off or recurring pledges. In fact, we’re counting on it. The initial campaign is to get the project up and running and to hire our first staff members. We’ve got lots of tech to build and lots of tasks to tick off.
After that, we’ll be relying on people who want to read accurate, verified news supporting our mission to produce it. We’ve all seen the problems caused by the ad-funded model — clickbait, fake news, terrible user experiences — it’s more important than ever that we find a way to reverse the trend.
Help us clear the last hurdle
We’re almost there. We just need a little more support to reach our target, and to claim the rest of the matching grants we’ve been offered.
Please help us in any way you can: a one-off pledge, ongoing support, a tweet, a Facebook post, an email — we’ve come so far. Let’s get over the finish line together.
