October 29, 2012

Will Prop. 38’s Micro Appeal Work?

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Here’s an interesting mailer that we got a couple of days ago from the folks supporting Prop. 38, which would raise taxes in California to provide additional funding to schools. It’s personalized to me—or to my zip code—and tells me just how much extra money my local schools would get if 38 passes. Clever!

And yet…oddly wrong. Of those three schools, only the middle school is near me. The two elementary schools are a couple of miles away even though I have two elementary schools within half a mile of my house. (Not to mention the nearby high school.) Does that mean that my local elementary schools wouldn’t get any Prop. 38 money? Or just that the Yes on 38 campaign uses a really lousy mapping program?

I don’t know. But I’m curious: does an appeal to such naked local self-interest work? It might! Something about it feels ineffective, though, as if the gameplaying is a little too obvious. Opinions?

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

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Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

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