Just in case you haven't seen the post I put up this morning on the RealSurf home page (see below), I wanted to bring it to your attention.
After many years, I've finally decided to do another fundraiser for both the Forums and RealSurf's home page.
As I note below, advertising income has sputtered away to just the barest trickle in the last few years. Recently it's got so bad that I'm paying server and accounting costs out of my own pocket. This is not a good thing and I really have to act.
Please have a read of the following and then stay tuned. I will be asking for your help!
-Don
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Here’s a head’s up for RealSurfers everywhere…
…yours truly is setting up a crowdfunding campaign for RealSurf.
Why?
RealSurf’s ad income really fell off a cliff a couple of years ago and now it’s so patchy that lately I’ve been making up the shortfall out of my own pocket – which, obviously, is not really sustainable. (And no, I don’t get a zack for my Saturday morning radio spot on our ABC !)
In addition to covering the hosting and bandwidth costs, there’s a list of things I’d really like to improve and extend – both on RealSurf and its forums. Chief among these is a major redesign to improve the way the site and forums look; not only on desktops and notebooks, but on the phones and tablets many of our visitors now use.
So rather than try to run a fundraiser the way we did years ago, I’m turning to a crowdfunding platform called Pozible.
The way it works is simple: I describe a clear set of objectives and set a target amount I need in order to meet said objectives. Then I create a series of ‘rewards’ at different dollar amounts, eg, $25 gets a RealSurf stubbie, $100 gets a stubbie and, say, a cap, etc. A good person such as yourself picks a reward/pledge amount and commits to pay via credit card or paypal.
The campaign runs for a limited period of time (generally a month or two).
Pozible will deliver funds only if the target is reached in the allotted time. (This helps ensure that goal-setting is realistic.)
If the effort were to fall short, RealSurf gets nada, nothing, zee-roh. (So, I’m going to be very conservative about the goal I set)
And this is important to understand: if it doesn’t work, those of you who pledged don’t get charged anything at all.
On the positive side, some really successful crowdfunding initiatives see their targets met well before the closing date – which is why it’s important to have “stretch goals” (ie, telling folks where any extra funding will go). I’m going to come up with some of those as well.
As you might imagine, there are lots of calculations to be made and many boxes to tick before I can launch the campaign. My goal is to have all those boxes ticked by the end of this week.
Then the campaign will have to be reviewed by the good folk at pozible.com before we can kick things off.
If you’d like to offer advice, comments, etc, please feel free to email me via don [at symbol] realsurf [dot] com.
Get that wallet ready and keep on smilin’!
