The fund drive and our annual budget.
Posted by Susan Marie Groppi
18 August 2009
From the very beginning, we've always tried to be very transparent about our finances. If we're asking for your money, we should be up-front with you about where it goes, right? Given our extraordinary success with this month's fund drive, I figure this is a good time to talk a little bit more about where that money is going.
Over on the main fund drive page, we made a list of what various donation amounts pay for. A regular week for us has one new fiction piece (average cost $200), one article ($50), one poem ($20), one column ($40), and three reviews (total $60). Some weeks we don't have all of those elements, but some weeks we have extra costs (like if we have an original illustration or comic), so we plan for an average of $400 for each week. We publish 51 weeks a year (giving our hard-working staff a week off in late December), so 400 times 51 is just over $20,000. Over the course of the year, we can accumulate several thousand dollars in other expenses. (Web hosting, convention promotions like the Strange Horizons tea parties, envelopes and postage for sending checks and contracts to our contributors, and a whole host of other tiny things.)
You might notice that the expenses breakdown doesn't include staff salaries. We don't have staff salaries. Everyone who works for Strange Horizons is a volunteer. I'm going to be honest with you and admit that there are days when I wish we hadn't committed ourselves to the volunteer-staff model, but it does help us stay financially viable. We have over fifty people working for the magazine at this point--multiple editors in every department, plus a new team of assistants in the fiction department, plus our fundraising staff and our web team and our proofreaders. This magazine doesn't produce itself, after all. Paying even a token salary to all fifty-plus staff members would make our budget untenable.
All told, our annual budget comes in at around $23,000. The fund drives obviously don't cover all of those costs. So where does the rest of the money come from? A little bit each year comes from foundation grants, and a little bit more comes from the Amazon Affiliates links in our bookstore. (The bookstore is a little out of date, but there's still good stuff in there!) The rest of it, the majority of our annual budget, comes from a small number of anonymous donors. Showing my history on the periphery of dot-coms, I think of them as our angel investors. They've given us unwavering support since the magazine's founding, and the only thing they've asked in return is that we continue to be working towards greater self-sufficiency.
Our annual fund-drive goals have been set based on what we think we can reasonably achieve, and we try to increase the goal every year. (The goal this year was $7000, and last year it was $6000.) Increasing the amount that we raise through reader donations serves several purposes. It gives us a little breathing room in the budget, and it removes some of the pressure on our angels. Not only that, it gives us an advantage when we're applying for funding from arts foundations--they prefer to give money to organizations that have already demonstrated that they can raise money on their own.
There's another important thing that reader donations do, though. Reader donations are the best and most tangible way to demonstrate that our readers think what we're doing is important. That helps with our angels and the arts foundations, but it also helps us, the fifty-some-odd people who are putting all of this time and energy into this work. As of yesterday morning, more than 360 people have donated to the fund drive, a lot of them just five or ten or twenty dollars. Every single one of those donations is a sign to us that someone appreciates what we're doing and wants us to keep doing it.
I hope that this helps explain why we're keeping the fund drive open through the rest of the month even though we've met (and well exceeded) our goal. We're going to keep offering prizes and incentives for people to publicize the fund drive (more on this week's prize in a bit!) and we're going to keep hoping that people get involved. Every donation, along with every mention of this fund drive on someone's blog or website, is a sign to us (and the rest of the world) that people like what we're doing and want us to keep doing it.
Comments (1)
Great post, Susan. Thanks so much for breaking it down for us.
Posted by Kristin | August 18, 2009 11:02 AM