Discussion Details
| Title: | Abolishing Fund Drive Once and For All? |
| Submitter: | The LINGUIST List |
| Description: | Dear Subscribers,
Every year we here at LINGUIST spend hours brainstorming how to make a fun, minimally annoying fund drive. We come up with (we think) cute gimmicks, appeal to the creative abilities of our advisory panelists and subscribers. This year we tried extra hard to be low key, struggling to avoid the implementation of pop ups or unremitting emails. This year we had the worst first-week turnout for donations ever. Clearly, the low key approach is lacking. Believe me, we dislike begging for money just as much as you dislike being begged. But the truth is, we need it to run. It's not that productivity would lessen, that a few student editors would lose their jobs, if we don't meet our goal for donations. We will cease to exist. It truly takes over twenty dedicated editors, who regularly take this work home with them, to maintain and update the site. You wouldn't just stop getting issues; the site would stop working. Our search engines would fail. Our pages would become obsolete. We've discussed alternatives to annual fund drives in our meetings. We could start charging subscription fees to receive emails, or to access the site, or both. We could stop working over the summer (May through August here in Michigan). We could enforce payment for various topics, such as jobs and conferences. All of our options have their pros and cons: we would therefore like to open the discussion to the floor. Do you have strong opinions about the options listed here, or any other fund-raising ideas? Please help us, so that we can continue helping you. - Your LINGUIST List Crew |
| Date Posted: | 24-Mar-2005 |
| Linguistic Field(s): | General Linguistics |
| LL Issue: | 16.894 |
| Posted: | 24-Mar-2005 |
