June 26, 2015

And Now For Something Completely Different


A new1 study from Swift, Stone, and Parker has identified the top four components of a successful online fundraising appeal. Here they are:

  • The end of a quarterly fundraising cycle.
  • Clear comparisons to the opposition’s fundraising results.
  • Over the top doomsaying.
  • Cats.

Lucky for me, I’ve got all those things, so I figured I’d take a crack at it.

Check out National Review’s current fundraising drive. One reader just gave $250! This guy coughed up $100! They’ve even got a wine club to suck in new contributors. And a cruise!

These guys are killing us. Without your help, the heirs of William F. Buckley will dominate the political magazine market for years to come. And you know what that means: More articles about how the only real racism is anti-white racism. More pseudo-science about how the globe is probably cooling, not warming. More hagiographies of Marco Rubio. More whining about how white people can’t use the N-word. More blog posts about Jonah Goldberg’s dog.

Maybe you think this doesn’t matter to you? Think again. This week features “Reagan’s Supply-Side Genius,” and it doesn’t matter if you try to ignore it. Your crazy uncle is going to be regaling you about it for hours this Thanksgiving unless you figure out how to fight back.

This blog is your ticket. We need contributions to help us fight back against the avalanche of right wing babble. Right. Now.

This is our final push. My cats are down to their last bowl of kibble. The fell hordes of NR are already cackling at their imminent victory. Soon we won’t be able to afford the very pixels that make up this blog. I know you don’t want that. So please, make a generous contribution today. The first $10 will go to cat food.2 The rest will go to fighting the dark hordes. And Jonah’s dog.

OK, I’m joking around here. But we really are closing out our fiscal year next week and Mother Jones can use all the help we can get. If you can afford to pitch in, please do—so I never have to write a fundraising appeal like this and actually mean it.

Make a tax-deductible gift by credit card here.

Or via PayPal here.

1: See the Annals of Improbably Convenient Results, v. 83, p. 101.
2: Just kidding. The cats already have a bottomless supply. Your full donation will go towards MoJo’s hard-hitting journalism that gets people talking. Like our groundbreaking package, “The True Costs of Gun Violence in America,” that President Obama alluded to in the wake of Charleston. 

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.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

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.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

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.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

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.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

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