We’re nearly ready to start the new year off with a whole new magazine and its first issue. There still aren’t many of us working on the staff and I think we’re doing fine for the few of us that are working. We don’t all live in the same places, so we can’t see each other in real life. But we are connected via the Internet.
Summary for December 2018:
no money in or out
over 671 hits on the blog
about 218 people get the posts emailed to them
20 people follow via WordPress
62 copies sold; US$435.04 raised for Dingo Venezia from Cat Tales of the Frisky9 Scarf Army
I’m not surprised we didn’t get more donations than we have. We’ve had none this month at all. I do know why. It’s because there aren’t enough people who know the staff and they aren’t sure if they can trust us. In this day and age, it’s perfectly understandable.
Recently, there were three people who used GoFundMe to raise money for a story they had made up. They are now in serious trouble. It’s not uncommon for people to scam others. I won’t go into the reasons why people scam others for money. But I will say when these things happen more frequently, it hurts all of us.
So, I’m not upset. There is another option that we already do to help raise money for cat charities. We have the book Cat Tales of the Frisky9 Scarf Army, which raises money for Dingo Venezia, a charity that helps cats in Venice, Italy and the surrounding islands. The book came about because I was interacting with the Cats of Twitter. They were behind the book every step of the way and I helped bring all their stories together. The ebook is still widely available. No money was spent on that project and it has raised US$435.04 and sold 62 copies. All that money has been sent to Dingo Venezia.
We are in the planning stages of another book about the Ambassacats of Twitter. They are led by Gladstone, a cat who came from a local shelter where he still lives, and now works in the treasury department in London, United Kingdom.
I know I’m looking forward to this project. There will be pictures and bios for each cat as there were in the other book. I’m sure Gladstone will want to talk about the Ambassacats and his life story as Frisky Le Rouge did in the book he was featured in.
So, if the only way we can raise money is by selling books, then we can do that. If this site cannot pay for itself before we have to renew the domain name, then we have another domain name we can use that is free. We will let you know if and when we need to make those changes.
Summary for November 2018:
no money in or out
over 400 hits on the blog
88 people get the posts emailed to them
13 people follow via WordPress
62 copies sold; US$435.04 raised for Dingo Venezia from Cat Tales of the Frisky9 Scarf Army
As you can see, our financial report for our first month isn’t so great. We had just enough to pay for the webhosting from WordPress and to pay the staff a little bit. We had a gofundme account which has yielded two out of the three donations. The third one came directly via PayPal. We did have an online auction at 32auctions.com which yielded nothing at all.
We do have an option to sell ad space, but we need at least 100,000 views per month. This month we’ve had less than 300 views. So, we need to increase the traffic to the site to activate this financial option.
I realize this is just the first month, so perhaps the donations are low due to being unknown and untried. We’ll see how it goes next month to see if our donations increase enough to pay the staff, contributors, and featured monthly charities.
And hopefully, the traffic to the site will increase well as we post more content.
Sir Socks Le Chat 