State of the 2016 Fund Drive: End of Week 3

Evening all,

It's graph time again! With two weeks left on the clock, what proportion of our goal have we raised so far?

The answer to that question, of course, depends on what you take as our goal. In the attached graph, progress in previous years -- all shown in grey -- is calculated as the percentage of the total amount ultimately raised. However, we don't yet know what that number is for 2016. So I've plotted two lines for this year: a blue line, which shows you how far along we are if you take our main funding goal of $15,000 as the target; and a red line, which shows you our progress against our overall goal of $23,000.

It's interesting how closely both lines map on to previous years. We're nigh-on at 50% of our main funding goal, and the only previous fund drive where we've been that far along at this stage is last year, which as I've already mentioned, and as you can see on the graph, was an anomalously straightforward year. What that means is that I feel very confident that we'll reach that main goal, and secure full funding for Strange Horizons next year. Hooray!

Against our overall goal, however, we're only 33% done. That's a more typical amount of progress for a fund drive at this stage -- so it suggests we still have a shot at raising enough money to fund both Samovar's translations and sub-Q's interactive fiction next year. History suggests that the approaching end of the fund drive tends to focus minds, and prompts an acceleration in donations. 

Will that happen one more time? We'll do what we can to make it happen, but ultimately, we'll have to wait and see.

-- Niall

P.S. Thank you so much to everyone from last year who's updated their pledges to reflect our switch from weekly to monthly billing! There are still a fair few of you on $0.75 and $1.00, however, so remember, you need to switch that to $4/month to keep getting our ebooks.