(NBC Universal)
Our crowdfunding campaign wrapped up last night at midnight, with a total of $1240 pledged by 24 supporters — enough to support the basic costs of the blog, and to tackle some of our more ambitious plans for the future, too. On behalf of all the Molecular Ecologist contributors, I’d like to thank everyone who pledged and helped spread the word about the campaign.
What’s next? Well, Indiegogo will release the funds within a couple weeks — as soon as they do that, our first order of business will be to send out the thank-you gifts our contributors have earned, and to pay off our hosting bills for 2016. I’ll e-mail contributors for information like tee-shirt sizing and shipping addresses, as needed.
We’ll also be putting together an audience survey to help determine how we can best spend the remaining funds, and to identify the best approaches for supporting the site in 2017 and beyond. Keep an eye out for that!
How to fund science communication, like issues of funding newsmedia in general, has been a perpetual question since before I got into science blogging, and it’s a tricky one to navigate. Here at TME, we write about the science we know and love, and precisely because we think that what we write about is important, we want to make it available to anyone with a web browser. Still, I do believe that valuable work shouldn’t be done for free, and I hope that what TME provides to our fellow molecular ecologists, and to the general public, is valuable. I think this experiment in fundraising has given us the first part of an answer to that conundrum, and I’m grateful to everyone who helped us find that answer.
— Jeremy
