State of the Fund Drive: End of Week 2

It's Sunday, so -- as those of you who were here last weekend will know -- it must be graph time! This week's graph is slightly more esoteric than last week's offering, but it's still good news.

If I'd put up an update of the cumulative percentage raised tracker from last week's post, what you would see is that we're still ahead of last year's curve. As Week 2 draws to a close, we've raised 38% of our goal from 226 donors; at this point last year, we'd raised 33% of our goal or 28% of our final total. Hooray! Another way of evaluating our situation, however, is looking at how far we still have to go, rather than how far we have come. And that's what the graph above does.

Each bar shows the difference between what remains of this year's goal, and what remained of our final total at the same time last year. Last year's fund drive raised $15,696; this year's goal is $18,000, to take up the slack of that one-year grant; so at day 0, the difference was -$2,304. You can see that after what was actually a slightly slower first day, in the first week we took big lumps out of that deficit; and at the start of this week, we eliminated it entirely. We've more or less kept pace with last year after that, but what it means is the amount we have to raise in the three weeks remaining is less than the amount we raised in the same period last year. It's still an awfully large amount -- we need just over $11,000 -- but it helps to know that it's an awfully large amount that we have raised before.

Meanwhile, in between email refreshes to check for new donations, I'm putting the finishing touches to tomorrow's ebook, getting ready to publish our next bonus content (excellent stories by Yukimi Ogawa and Roshani Chokshi, coming your way when we've raised just another couple of hundred dollars), and finalising covers for the fifteenth anniversary ebook and the fund drive special ebook. (I promised you a full table of contents for the former, didn't I? Soon, soon.) Further updates, as they say, as events warrant.

-- Niall