[A little note. I’m getting emails from websites asking to raise $30,000 or more. TMV is now trying to raise a relatively small amount of $2500 MINIMUM to pay off a few bills and get a modest reserve going into 2016 when a new advertising strategy will be coupled with our new design. We are CLOSE TO OUR GOAL.]
As you can see, The Moderate Voice has a new look — and now we need to do a fundraiser to pay for it and also to get a reserve for the now extremely small TMV bank account. Our goal is to keep the fundraiser going until we raise a total of at least $2,500. ($2274 raised so far…)
This most recent design isn’t just to help TMV look more current — but also to essentially start from scratch and rebuild the site so it’s more functional and more secure. Like several other sites (and I am learning about more of them every single day), we are under constant attack by people who want to hack the site and/or subject it to a massive DoS attack to bring it down because they clearly don’t like some of what we offer.
And there’s another advantage for a new design: we’ve had to turn away a lot of advertising in recent years due to problems with old design and the new design can a help TMV generate the income it needs to pay for itself.
TMV needs your help — but unlike a lot of websites that are asking for $35,000 or $10,000 or offering subscriptions, we are seeking to raise $2500 in this fundraiser which would pay for the redo and another bill and leave us with a modest reserve.
HERE’S HOW YOU CAN HELP — and WE NEED YOUR HELP:
1. DONATE by hitting the DONATE button to the right. Donations of any size are welcome. This button allows you to donate via Paypal or via credit card via paypal.
2. SPREAD THE WORD TO OTHERS WHO MAY WISH TO DONATE: Do you know of an individual or group that likes TMV and would donate? A word of warning. That will not impact the posts we use or don’t use or the views on posts one iota.
3. Think about doing what several readers have done: without our prodding, they set up a recurring monthly via paypal, which Helps in the long-run. It can be a small donation or larger. (We had one reader whose automatic payment stopped. But we appreciate the donations he made for several months.) ALL DONATIONS HELP. If readers set up $10 a month of $25 a month via paypal, it helps.
The issue of checks has come up. Checks should be made out to the account that has been TMV’s biz account since 2004, a business acounnt in the name of Joe Gandelman, the BoA bank account that pays for hosting, tech work, and a few special syndicated features. It’s also where all ad revenues go. Email me for the mailing address.
We’ve done fundraisers sparingly over the years — the one earlier this year to help replace nearly $1,000 spent on a legal issue. Yours truly paid that legal fee but took the roughly $1200 from the fundraiser and left it in the TMV account. Ad revenues were down and the fundraiser really should have gone on a bit more. When the issue of TMV’s security came up and we decided on a design, as soon as I learned the price I immediately took it out of the TMV bank account, which was slowly going down as we paid for hosting and some of our syndicated features.
Why is this fundraiser important?
There is NO big bankroll or group behind TMV or that helps fund TMV regularly, or even periodically. TMV is different than many blogs that are big blogs, have big money behind it, or get huge hits and have lots of ads and donors.
With the exception of several significant and heartening instances during this site’s 12 years, TMV hasn’t had not had any really monster regular donors. Its money comes from a limited number of unsolicited donations throughout the year and from ads — which have been problematic as some companies TMV had as advertisers went out of business. Site administrator Tyrone Steels carefully looks into each ad request to see if we can do it, should do it, and to ensure it is legitimate.
The old design had its limits on what ads could go on the available “real estate,” and the way the site was set up in general. Due to the site’s bottom line need, we’re wiping TMV of any free ads — and its “real estate” will have to provide income.
A final word on the design.
An enormous amount of thought and discussion went into this — discussion by email, text and phone between yours truly and site administrator Tyrone Steels. He deserves the credit for taking security needs and design ideas and turning needs and concepts into reality. I saw the design when readers did: when it debuted.
In the meantime, if you like TMV and want to see it grow NOW is the time to contribute or get the word out to others who might contribute so that we reach our modest goal of $2500 which would help pay the bills and also give us a reserve as we try and take TMV to another level in hits, content and income to make it self-sustaining. If the site makes more money in ads, it can be invested in more upgrades.
UPDATE: Dec. 20: We received $75 more in donations which means we’ve met $2274 of our $2500 goal.
UPDATE: Dec. 20. Over the past few days we received $106 more in donations which was triple matched by jdledell who gave $318 — which means means we’ve met $2199 of our $2500 goal.
UPDATE: Dec. 15. I was traveling and unable to do this update. We have received $50 more in donations which was triple matched by jdledell– which means we have received $1775 total towards our $2500 goal.
UPDDATE: Nov. 12: Yesterday we received $165 more in donations which was triple matched by commenter friend jdledell who contributed $495 that means $1575 so far to reach our $2500 goal.
*UPDATE: Nov. 11: Yesterday we received $80 more in donations which was matched by commenter friend jdledell which means $920 so far to reach our goal of $2500.
UPDATE: Nov. 10: Yesterday we received $120 more in donations — which jdledell has matched which means $760 so far to our must-reach goal of $2500.
UPDATE: Nov. 9: As of yesterday, we received $260. Our commenter friend jdledell has offered to match contributions and he did — so our total so far is $520. $1980 to go.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.