Strange Horizons

State of the Fund Drive: End of Week 4

Added 2015-10-11 23:03:37 +0000 UTC

The dreaded fund drive doldrums have finally arrived. Over the course of this weekend, only $165 has been donated, compared to $715, $1204, and $817 for the other weekends this year (it's almost like there were several large conventions happening in North America...). This normally happens at some point: I admit, I was starting to think that it wouldn't this year, but last year the lowest weekend saw a mere $128 raised, so in that sense we're still doing OK.

I also admit I was hoping to chip away at our final week target a little bit more, however. Earlier in the week I thought we might get it down to $5k, or even a bit less.

This week's graph shows how much we've raised in the final week of the fund drive over the last few years. The positive interpretation is that we're so far ahead of last year that we need substantially less to reach our higher goal. The slightly less positive interpretation is that maybe we just reached our donors sooner this year, and we're going to find ourselves maxed out without reaching the goal -- or maybe last year was just an outlier.

We shall see. We have a few bits of promotion lined up for this week, which might reach out to new potential donors as well as existing readers. We've got some of the most tempting of our bonus content still to come (that Kelly Link story!), and a final round of new donor prizes tomorrow. And it has historically been the case that the ticking clock in the final week tends to focus minds somewhat.

Fingers crossed, eh?

-- Niall