State of the Fund Drive: End of Week 3

This week's graph is potentially confusing but actually remains encouraging!

What we have here is progress through the last four fund drives, as indicated by the average daily donation needed to hit that year's goal. The right-hand side of the graph gets a little excitable because we typically enter the final week with some distance to go, and then get a last-minute flurry of donations to carry us over the finish line. (2012 was a partial exception, I think because we had hit our target and were aiming for stretch goals. We still got a lot of donations in the last week in 2012, they just didn't accelerate through the week in the way they did in 2013 and 2014.) 

The thing to look at is how flat this year's line (the purple line) is. After day 1, we needed $514 per day to hit our goal -- the highest starting point in any of these four years. But look at what hasn't happened. By this point in 2012, with two weeks to go, our required average had increased from $307 to £510 per day; in 2013, from $367 to $579; and in 2014, from $448 to a whopping $699. In contrast, as of right now, this year we only need $548 per day to make our full fund drive goal.

That's almost certainly going to creep up a bit further over the coming week. But look at it this way: if we received zero donations over the next seven days (which, to be clear, I profoundly hope does not happen) we'd go into the final week needing $1095 per day -- and last year, in that week, we received $1111 per day. We'd be up against it, but we'd still have a shot.

So this graph is another indication that things are on course. People have donated early this year, and they have donated consistently this year, and that makes things so much less nerve-wracking for us. Thank you!

I'll leave you with a little teaser for tomorrow's issue: the opening of Naru Dames Sundar's story "Broken-Winged Love":

I didn't love my baby when it was but the dream of an iron-heart's seed. I heard the iron-heart in my time of heat, mind-addled, my lungs heaving gouts of sulfur. Afterward, our tails curved amidst shattered rock and molten magma, I regretted my choice. The time was too early, the act irreversible. I groused so to the iron-heart, and he simply laughed, his charcoal scales quivering. I snapped at his throat, tasting the sour tang of blood and copper. He did not stay long.

And I'll be back tomorrow when the whole thing is up.

-- Niall