saebender
commented
4 years ago Next draft based on @thilo's comments:
We didn’t think we’d be reaching out to you so soon after our last post, but this has been a highly unusual time, in the best way. We’ve reached our one-time goal and our recurring goal is just a few memberships away. That means:
We can safely say that we’ll be able to sign the rental contract for 2020! Feel free to celebrate with us...
Thank you thank you thank you! You should all be proud of yourselves for the work you’ve put into making this campaign a success. We wouldn’t be writing to you now without your hard work and dedication to making sure co.up won’t disappear in January.
...but don’t stop reading yet—we need to turn this momentum into a long-term strategy
One of the most common questions we’ve heard is: "Do you have a strategy to stay open long-term?" The answer has always been: "Yes, but first we need to pay the rent."
We’ve secured the rent—now it’s time to build our long-term foundation. The initial goal was designed to keep co.up running. But during the fundraiser we have seen the opportunity to move our scope beyond just staying open; we have the potential to expand our event offerings, provide new levels of support to our organizers, and increase our ability to stay in the space for years to come. We’re now going to try to reach 3300 EUR in recurring donations by January 10th, 2020, to try and accomplish the goals below:
Renovate, update, and reach out
- To support free and open community events, we want to rent out co.up commercially a few times a month to organizations that can afford it (not community organizations). Our bare-bones furniture has always been an issue for this. We want to purchase better tables, chairs, boards, and flip charts so that the space has a fighting chance of appealing to well-funded organizations deciding which space to rent.
- Another common request is for recruitment events. We plan to run regular events to bring together interested attendees with recruiters. Extra funds will allow us to put money into communication, labor, and materials to get these events running as soon as possible so that we can generate revenue from them asap. Without extra money, it may take several months before we can start offering these recruitment events.
- We also learned how else we can support the meetups, but most ideas will require coordination and communication to implement, which we’ll need to pay people for. Some of these ideas are: a meetup fund to pay recurring costs like website hosting, meetup.com fees so organizers don't have to pay out of their own pockets, and recruiting events, among others.
- And the big one: We want to add an non-profit entity to enable tax exempt donations as well as file for public funding. This is going to take both labor and legal fees, as well as an organizational headache. But it’s also a way to make sure that co.up has a stable source of revenue that will allow us both flexibility and independence.
A lasting impression
https://twitter.com/fox/status/1206870541925154816
https://twitter.com/Herzblutfaktor/status/1197068400931020800
https://twitter.com/daiyitastic/status/1196709237683970049
https://twitter.com/_die_katrin/status/1194564180768108545
https://twitter.com/Argorak/status/1192055907108237318
https://twitter.com/janl/status/1206858829641715712
We are honestly overwhelmed by how successful this campaign has been! But we aren‘t letting it get to our heads; the future of co.up depends on how we can leverage this success to make something that lasts. We need everyone to know that it’s not yet the time to rest and there’s a lot of work left to do.
Good job everyone! Now let’s #saveCoUp
Here’s the text of the next blog post. There are a few twitter links that need to be embedded in the last section. Let me know if there are any changes you’d like to make!
We didn’t think we’d be reaching out to you so soon after our last post, but this has been a highly unusual time, in the best way. We’ve reached our one-time goal and our recurring goal is just a few memberships away. That means:
We can safely say that we’ll be able to sign the rental contract for 2020! Feel free to celebrate with us...
Thank you thank you thank you! You should all be proud of yourselves for the work you’ve put into making this campaign a success. We wouldn’t be writing to you now without your hard work and dedication to making sure co.up won’t disappear in January.
...but don’t stop reading yet—we need to turn this momentum into a long-term strategy
One of the most common questions we’ve heard is: "Do you have a strategy to stay open long-term?" The answer has always been: "Yes, but first we need to pay the rent."
We’ve secured the rent—now it’s time to build our long-term foundation. The initial goal was designed to keep co.up running. But during the fundraiser we discovered a few ideas to improve our organizers' experience and increase our ability to stay in the space for years to come. We’re now going to try to reach 3300 EUR in recurring donations by January 10th, 2020, to try and accomplish the goals below:
Renovate, update, and reach out
A lasting impression
https://twitter.com/fox/status/1206870541925154816
https://twitter.com/Herzblutfaktor/status/1197068400931020800
https://twitter.com/daiyitastic/status/1196709237683970049
https://twitter.com/_die_katrin/status/1194564180768108545
https://twitter.com/Argorak/status/1192055907108237318
https://twitter.com/janl/status/1206858829641715712
We are honestly overwhelmed by how successful this campaign has been! But we aren‘t letting it get to our heads; the future of co.up depends on how we can leverage this success to make something that lasts. We need everyone to know that it’s not yet the time to rest and there’s a lot of work left to do.
Good job everyone! Now let’s #saveCoUp