State of the 2016 Fund Drive: End of Week 2

Hi all,

This slightly belated update brought to you by the terrible, terrible wifi at the hotel I was staying at last night. Short version: it's all going ... OK.

(Brief digression: long-term patrons, have you updated your pledges yet? Don't forget, because we've switched to monthly, you need to update to $4/month to get the September ebook, due out later today.)

Back to the numbers!

If I'd shared an updated version of last week's graph with this post, showing total cumulative donations, you'd see that we've continued pretty much smack in between the 2014 and 2015 lines. Our week 2 total is about the same as week 2 for those years -- we haven't lost ground --  it's just that 2015 got a faster start and 2014 got a slower one. The upshot: as of this evening we've raised just over $5,900, compared to $4,500 at this point in 2014, but just over $8,000 at this point in 2015. 

Last week's trend of the unusually high average donation, however, continues. We've had 123 donors so far this year; at this point in 2014 we'd had 122, but as I just told you, we've raised $1,400 more, working out to an average donation of $48, as opposed to $32.

This week's graph shows you exactly how unusual that is. The typical curve for a fund drive has a lot of fluctuation in the first few days -- when the total number of donors is low, and the average can be skewed by a few large or small donations -- but since 2011, has pretty quickly settled to somewhere in the $25-$30 range, and stayed there for the duration of the fund drive. (Note 2015: because so many people donated so early, it's the closest thing on the graph to a flat line.) This year we're in uncharted territory. We've dipped slightly from the high of $52, but even so, it just looks -- and feels -- a bit weird.

I'm not complaining, but I still don't have a good explanation for why it's happening. The new Patreon tier of $4/month must be part of it, but only about a quarter of donations so far have come through that route. (Welcome!) The one thing I can tell you is that most of the people making substantial donations are regulars: they're just donating a little more than usual, or a little earlier than usual. So I think the most likely outcome is still that the average drifts down to the normal range over the next few weeks -- but I'll keep you posted.

In the meantime, this week you can look forward to -- surely -- our bonus interview with Garth Nix and -- hopefully -- extra poems by Margaret Wack and Karin Lowachee. We've also announced an additional Patreon goal: if we reach 300 patrons, we'll publish  Lawrence Schimel's translation of "Terpsichore", a story by Argentinian writer Teresa P. Mira de Echeverría. So if you have any friends you think might enjoy the magazine, now's the time to encourage them to sign up!

-- Niall