All of us at Naked Capitalism want to thank our many donors for your generous support in this year’s fundraiser. Even though we fell a bit more than $3,000 short of our final donor target of $35,000 for original reporting, this our most successful fundraiser in financial terms ever.
We also had 1810 donors, nearly 200 more than last year, setting anther new record. It was particularly gratifying to see that we not only many new donors, but more donors outside the US than in the past.
For those of you who might have been busy or were tight on budget, we are here and open for donations all year. We have our fundraiser not only to encourage readers to contribute but also so we have a good idea of what we’ll have in the till for the upcoming year.
So if you missed the deadline, don’t let that stop you from chipping in and funding more original reporting!
And if you aren’t in a position to contribute financially, there are other ways you can help make this site more informative and effective, by sharing what you learn here with others, encouraging them to read the site, participating in the comments section, and sending us links, cute animal pictures, and plantidotes.
Again, thanks for your generosity and helping set the foundation for the upcoming year! All of us involved with Naked Capitalism are thinking even harder about what we can do to improve the site and strengthen our community. We look forward to continuing to work together with you.
19 comments
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Speaking of links, here is a very interesting 1985 interview with Steve Jobs
where he predicts smart phones, big data among other things
I am rather disappointed that at no time that I have seen during this fundraiser you have discussed the contributions of people who give on a monthly basis. During the previous fundraiser I decided to sign up for monthly giving, enabling me to get more over the course of the year and I assume extending my giving until I decide to cancel it. I felt really good about doing it this way. Then this fundraiser comes along and I asked how monthly contributors like myself were included in the total of donors and amount of cash raised. I never saw an answer. I did however see another person ask the same question. Are we who give monthly expected to also give during the annual fundraiser in order to be counted as contributors to the site? Because right now, I feel like my contribution doesn’t count, and that’s not a good feeling. Congratulations on your fundraiser. I just wish I knew how I participated in it.
THANK YOU B1 for your support and for your comments. I would like to call out a dozen people but I know I would leave out others equally important–I have learned SO MUCH here from other commenters and the back-and-forth as well as the NC “faculty”. Some of the most important links I have picked up here were in the comments section.
As I emailed Yves et al, I really went through withdrawal and a slight depression when comments were shut down.
Although I value this site highly, I can barely afford to contribute anything. But, to the original poster, why do you need external validation for your contributions? It seems to me that you should feel good knowing that you have helped the site without needing someone to personally thank you.
nice. and you typed this into a box below the directive to criticize ideas, not people
it is an ideal perhaps to strive for not to need external validation, but by no means is everybody there. in any case, B1 was simply asking for factual information, not validation. he wants to know how the monthly contributors are counted when it comes to fundraisers. this seems to me a legitimate question.
i chose to provide validation because I happen to have appreciated his comments in the past and I like his handle, abbreviated I assume from Gandhi, whom i greatly respect: Be the change you wish to see in the world.
good advice for all of us
A corollary: As you are part of this world, by making yourself a better person, you are making the world a better place.
Thank you chi girl for your support in this matter, you have correctly summarized my intentions.
Also, I am touched that you have enjoyed my comments in the past, as I always I feel like the dumbest person in the room around here. And I enjoy your comments a great deal.
I also felt adrift during the time that comments were closed down. It really showed me how important an exceptionally well run comment section is to those of us who want to critically understand our world.
By the way, you are correct as to the origin of my handle, and we share the same gender.
oops, sorry for the assumption, maybe it was the association with Gandhi, a male ;-)
I don’t know where you got the idea that we don’t count monthly contributions. We can count only the current month since people who contribute monthly can cancel at any time or forget to update their credit card number when it expires or is cancelled due to fraud (I had that happen four times on one card in a mere month), so we do have a lot of churn in our monthly contributors.
In addition, the monthly contributions are important in a different way: they serve to buffer declines in our ad income, and let me stress that our ad income is very unpredictable.
Moreover, if you are so petty that you’ll cancel over something like this you really do not care about this site. We’ve had people make large donations and say, “Please don’t send me a thank you note, I’d rather have you spend your time on the site itself.”
omg Yves, you didn’t read what he wrote! he never said he was cancelling over this. What a shame that you felt the need not to just answer the question but to gratuitously accusing him of not caring about the site and of being petty.
So some people don’t want a thank you note, does that delegitimize his wish to understand whether the monthly contributions are included in the total raised by the fundraiser?
I don’t get it.
Please read what he said and what I said again. I wrote a post profusely thanking donors for contributing to the fundraiser. He undermined that by making the unfounded charge that we weren’t counting the donations of subscribers. He FURTHER made a threat about cancelling.
This has the effect of undermining the post, which means our fundraising efforts, which in turn undermines the site. I am at a loss to see how you don’t see that. I know he wrapped his core issue in other words to make his comment seem like less of an attack, but the underlying message still comes through even if that was not his intent.
While we very much appreciate and very much depend on donations, the fact that we run this site with all of 1.6 people equivalent means that requests for explanations as to how we do things adds to our load and takes time away from our most important obligation, posting, and our second most important obligation, managing the comments section. That is why I mentioned the messages from donors saying, in effect, “I get your situation and I understand that you need to be ruthless with how you spend your time and I agree with how you set priorities.” I am so chronically time stressed that five minutes is a lot of time for me. It means five minutes less of sleep because I have no where else for it to come from.
Even in our limited way, we give readers more in the way of detail as to what their donations are budgeted for over the next year than the overwhelming majority of sites in our space, including much bigger ones.
There has been a misunderstanding here. In no way did I intend to insinuate that I would cancel. (I was hoping to verify that the monthly donation that I was making did indeed continue until I canceled. For all I know it was only good for a year and then it would stop on its own.)
When you run fundraising like you do, it’s exciting for your loyal readers to see the numbers go up and the money go up. I watch it all with excitement, but there’s a gnawing question for me, do I need to make a separate donation to be included in the counts? It may seem silly, but being that there are seven or twelve seperate posts about the fundraiser, it kind of adds up.
Perhaps somewhere you spoke to how monthly donations are counted. If so I missed it. If not I urge you to cover it clearly next time. While I apologize for giving you more work, I’m trying to let you know how it feels to be a monthly supporter who is unsure about how they’re participating in the exciting fundraiser.
Congratulations on having a great fundraiser, and thanks for telling me how I participated in it. I am glad to be an important part of the support system for this wonderful site. Even though only one month’s amount is counted towards the money totals, I know that I count as a number, and that’s very important to me. My profuse apologies for the misunderstanding, I was a bit piqued about feeling uncounted and it must have come through in my posting. Mea culpa.
Yves, I am very sad to have caused all of these resentments in someone I very much respect.
I apologize for posting my question here in this thread where you are thanking your supporters, of which I am one. As I said, I asked the question previously and did not see a response. I saw another person ask a similar question with no response that I saw. This looked like the last opportunity for me to ask the question.
Please know that I did not in any way intend to undermine you, your site, or your fundraiser. Please know that you have my full support, and I’m happy to have the opportunity to contribute. I apologize for even asking the question, given how it has turned out. The answers I got, while satisfying, were not worth the emotional stress that it caused Yves and me. (I can’t imagine that I would ever attack you or this site, and for you to think so is something I deeply regret.)
Of course, now that I reread my original comment and see Yves’s responses, I see that there was quite a bit of pique that came through. I’m sorry for that, and embarrassed. I try to be diplomatic in my criticisms and questions, but I’m obviously not very good at it.
To be clear, I got that idea from a lack of information.
(This comment is a reply to Yves’s first comment.)
I’m coming late to this discussion so let me make a few general points:
1) Naked Capitalism values every single contributor, whether their contribution be large or small (and large to whom? see Mark 12:41-44). It is the fact of contribution that counts!
2) Naked Capitalism doesn’t sort contributors by their manner of giving. In the same way that we don’t worry whether contributions are large or small, we don’t run campaigns based on checks vs. PayPal, or domestic (United States) vs. foreign, or any of the other ways that mailing list mavens like to slice and dice things. It follows that we don’t single out one-time contributors vs. subscribers.* And that’s a good thing, because we don’t want to make non-subscribers feel “less than” subscribers, because they have made the choice to give in the manner they are comfortable with (and perhaps are unable to subscribe in any case, if their fortunes are irregular).
3) Naked Capitalism’s annual fundraiser is necessarily about contributions that we do not have, and that we hope you all are generous enough to give, because of past performance and what you all hope to see in the future. When figuring the total goal for the fundraiser, we begin with projections of expected revenues from existing sources. So subscriptions (which though individually greatly valued, are in the aggregate a small part of the expected sources) somewhat fall between the two stools; they’re surely contributions, but they’re also not contributions we do not have. So perhaps there’s a bit of a mental glitch here. So I’m torn: On the one hand, I appreciate the desire to give NC an added sense of security; on the other, I’m very reluctant to single out a subset of our contributors as especially deserving.
I hope this helps.
* If you will put yourself in our shoes for a moment, you will see that from our perspective, there’s not that much difference in any case; people can and do cancel subscriptions for any number of good reasons, so operationally there is little distinction between contributions and subscriptions, except perhaps — speaking for myself, here — for the feeling of security that subscriptions give and we appreciate. But from the business perspective, the feeling can be illusory.
Ah sir, see: had you only been earlier all of this could have been avoided!
Thanks for calming the waters…
This is exciting and gratifying news for me as well, the outside-the-US support of the site. Thanks for all your hard work!
Gee, I contribute annually & sometimes in between. I think we should all be giving Yves & Lambert & the gang a big THANK YOU for keeping this site up, improving, and reaching more folks to try and make a difference.
No thanks needed here, just keep up the good work
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