State of the 2016 Fund Drive: End of Week 1

Hi all,

Graph time! (And, new patrons, hi!)

As those of you who joined early in last year's fund drive will know, I like making graphs of our donation data. We have a ridiculously large and complex spreadsheet to track how much money has come in -- since we're receiving donations from several different places, here and PayPal and NetworkForGood and Benevity -- that we've been using since I took over as editor-in-chief. I like to think this is actually useful. You can start to see what promotion techniques work: 2012 is when we started publishing bonus content, and you can see how having those interim milestones brings the donation curve forwards in subsequent years. Similarly, the big spike on day 21 of the 2013 curve is a guest post on John Scalzi's blog. It's also somewhat reassuring to have  a graph that reminds me, when we're three weeks in and only a third of the way to our goal, that this is just how it goes.

What the graph shows this year is that the news from the first week is mixed. If you compare it to progress against our 2017 funding goal of $15,000 -- which is roughly how much we raised in 2014 -- we're slightly ahead of the curve, hooray! On the other hand, if you compare it to progress against our overall goal of $23,000 -- which is slightly more than we raised last year -- we're behind the curve, boo. At this point last year we had raised about $5,000; this year so far we've raised $3,400.

Why the difference? Well, last year was our fifteenth anniversary, and was the year we launched this Patreon: I suspect those factors had a booster effect. 

Does it mean this year's fund drive is already a foregone conclusion? No, of course not. One interesting piece of information that you can't get from the above graph is that this year's total has been raised from 73 donors with an average donation of $47; the total at this point last year had been raised from 144 donors with an average donation of $34.  To put those numbers in context, at the end of the fund drive the average donation is usually between $25 and $35, and I cannot recall, at any stage of a fund drive, ever having seen an average of $47 before. 

What I take from those numbers is that an unusually high number of the readers who normally tip in $10 or $20 have not yet done so. Another 70 people donating that amount is most of the difference between 2015 and this year. Will we make up the gap later in the fund drive? We'll just have to wait and see.

-- Niall

P. S. Thank you to all the existing patrons who have already upped their pledges following the switch to a monthly rate -- those who haven't, if you want to receive the September ebooks next week, don't forget that you need to up your support to the $4/month level.