Okay — so we didn’t reach $50,000 by Monday but we are now a quarter of the way to our target amount — an impressive effort in two weeks! There’s plenty to do in the next five weeks of our campaign but we’re confident we can make our target of $175,000.
We now have 474 supporters who have contributed over $44,000.
To celebrate — and of course, to drum up some extra support — we’re planning a New Matilda pub trivia night. The event will be held in Sydney by virtue of our being here, but we warmly encourage any interstate friends who want to hold a similar event in their cities. Drop us a line if you’re interested.
In preparation, we are inviting readers to submit their quiz questions, the best of which will be used on the night. Ever wished your pet topic would come up at pub trivia? Well now is your chance to influence the line-up. Make them funny, make them political, make them obscure — but most of all make them Latte Belt appropriate.
To submit a question email enquiriesATnewmatilda.com with QUIZ NIGHT in the subject line. Alternatively, tweet us on the @NewMatilda account using the hashtag #NMquiz. If you’ve got questions for the editors, we’ll be facing a special session about the relaunch of New Matilda and our plans for the new year. We’re going to let someone else moderate these — so fire away. We’ll run our answers on the site for those who can’t attend.
We’ll be announcing full details of the event later this week — prizes, NM celebrities and all.
A big thanks to the 70-odd people who have pledged their support since Friday! It is incredibly encouraging to us that nearly 500 people value our work enough to donate a significant amount of their hard-earned cash. Although it can be a struggle to keep the site turning over with very little funding behind us, the growing pie chart on our FundBreak page has certainly helped buoy morale.
To those of you who have had difficulty using the FundBreak site to make a donation — please bear with us. We realise it requires a few more steps than is ideal, but really appreciate your persistence, and are happy to help should you require it. If you’re having troubles, email us on enquiriesATnewmatilda.com and we’ll see what we can do.
A few people have asked why we chose to use FundBreak at all, instead of our own payment facility. It’s pretty simple: we are starting with very little money behind us we simply did not have the budget to build an in-house payment facility, certainly not one which affords us the security and functionality of the FundBreak model. We also see benefits in raising money in such a public way — the set-up of the FundBreak site means we are able to be completely transparent with our supporters. We’re happy to be working with FundBreak, a small and dynamic start-up run by young Sydneysiders whose energy and ingenuity resonates with what we’re trying to achieve here at NM. We’ll be running a profile on the FundBreak crew later in the month.
Have a great week.