Hello all!
We're writing with an update on our March membership drive, at long last. It was a fabulous drive! We raised $11,142 from 396 donations: 222 members renewed their memberships, 167 new folks joined the organization as members, and the other donations were "just donations" which don't confer membership (voting rights.)
The vast majority of our members are in the United States, with the United Kingdom coming in second. We also have a fair number of members in Canada, Germany, and Australia. Other countries represented on our membership rolls include Belgium, Chile, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Ireland, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Switzerland, and Timor-Leste, plus we have a handful of donors whose location is "unspecified." Wow!
Most of our donations were in the US$25 range, though many folks gave less and many gave more. (We are grateful to all of our members and supporters, regardless of the size of anyone's donation.) We're thrilled that more than two hundred of our current members renewed their memberships, and over the moon to have a hundred and sixty-seven new members! One of our tasks now is encouraging those who didn't renew their membership to do so.
If you joined the organization during our first year and have not renewed your membership, we'd love to know why and to figure out whether there's anything we can do to entice you to support the OTW again. If you are a member who didn't renew, we'd love to hear from you! Please drop us a comment on this post, or use the handy contact us form, and let us know what we could be doing better.
(Actually, whether or not you're a member who didn't renew, we'd love to hear from you. We'll do our best to answer all comments and emails, so please reach out if you have questions or suggestions for the folks in Dev/Mem!)
All in all, we are thrilled with how this drive went. Most of the money we raised will go toward the cost of colocated servers for the Archive of Our Own; the tech folks are busy researching server options, and we in DevMem are delighted to be able to tell them that we've raised this much money toward "owning the goddamned servers" at last. The rest will go toward assorted organizational costs and into the bank, for when we need it for the ongoing costs of maintaining those servers! And other costs as well, of course.
If you didn't donate during the drive, never fear; you can donate, or become a member, at any time during the year. Our next big push for donations will come in October; until then, we'll be hanging back and working on other Dev/Mem projects. Many thanks to all who donated!
- The Dev/Mem Committee of the OTW: Carla, Elizabeth, Monica, Rachel, Shoshanna, and Vera
