Over the past year, Eclectablog has grown significantly. We have brought on two new exciting writers, educator Mitchell Robinson, seasoned journalist, columnist, and reporter Susan Demas, and Detroit poet and activist Tawana “Honeycomb” Petty. LOLGOP and I have also started a new podcast called “The Sit and Spin Room with LOLGOP & Eclectablog“. This has added an additional significant cost for hosting our podcast files on the Blubrry network and on SoundCloud.
We also dealt with some growth issues when our current servers weren’t up to the task when things got very busy on the site. We were also taken down for a day by a distributed denial of service (DDOS) attack. Because of these things we have had to upgrade service and subscribe to both Cloudflare and WordFence to keep the site up under heavy loads and to avoid getting taken down again during a DDOS attack.
Each year we do four week-long fundraisers where we come to you once a day for seven days asking for your support. In addition to this, we hold an annual fundraising party which brings in most of our funding. Last year’s party was so successful that we skipped the summer quarterly fundraiser. However, that means we need to make up some ground this week in order to have enough funds remaining until our next party to keep paying all of our amazing writers.
So, here I am, hat in hand, asking you to do what you can to support us financially. On a slow day, we get over 1,000 visitors and on most day it’s between 3,000 and 5,000. And we get LOTS of repeat visitors which tells me folks value what we do here. And for good reason:
- Award-winning writer Amy Lynn Smith has been telling the stories of people in the transgender community as well as Affordable Care Act success stories in a way nobody else has.
- Mitchell Robinson has detailing the corporatist attacks on public education and exposing Betsy DeVos for the enemy of public education that she is better than anyone else in the country.
- LOLGOP is slowly but surely teaching Democrats across the nation how to do framing and messaging in a way that’s effective and impactful, always with the smartest and funniest take of anyone around.
- And, of course, nobody has kept the Flint Water Crisis on the national radar more doggedly than Eclectablog.
We do all of this without any ads on the site other than an occasional promotion of one of our progressive partners and the ones served by the Disqus commenting system. NO ADS! What other quality blog do you go to that has NO ADS?!
If you are able to help support us financially, we would be most grateful. There are two ways to help. First, you can use the handy PayPal forms at the top of the right sidebar to make a one-time donation via Paypal or to set up a monthly donation. Second, you can send a check (which avoids Paypal taking out a percentage of your donation) to Chris Savage, P.O. Box 32, Dexter, MI 48130. Please make the check payable to “Eclectablog”.
To sweeten the pot this time, for every donation of $75 or more, we will send you my wife Anne’s incredible photomosaic of Barack Obama titled “Out of Many, We are One“. This image, created out of the faces of people attending his rallies in 2008, appeared as a two-page spread in TIME magazine in their January 2009 Person of the Year issue and has been on the cover of magazines and books around the world:
Thank you for your continued support.
