As we go into the weekend I want to thank everyone who’s contributed so far to this year’s drive for the TPM Journalism Fund. We hit the half way point to our goal of raising $500,000 early yesterday morning. Even though we’ve gotten a lot more experience at holding these drives they remain nerve-wracking. They amount to a collective trust-fall – hopefully – into the arms of the larger TPM community. So it always feels really good, at many different levels, when you’re there for us. If you have had a moment to contribute yet you can click right here. It’s easy and quick.
We’ve always gained quite a few new members recently. Which is wonderful. And we want to welcome all of you. We’re still trying to understand the precise reasons for it.
One reason seems to be our new membership system in itself, by which I mean the software that runs it. As you know, our business is almost entirely based on membership fees. So a smoothly running system to manage memberships in all its dimensions – processing fees, authenticating users, record keeping and user experience – is mission critical. (Neither the old or the new system ever touch or store your credit cards. For that we use the industry-standard security and fulfillment of Stripe dot com.)
There are a number of commercial products that can do a lot of this. But the cost in fees is enormous. At our scale switching to one of them would run at least – depending on which one we used – into the hundreds of thousands of dollars. That’s simply unworkable. And all of those operations are VC-backed, which means their model is to get a locked in user base and then raise prices. (Avoiding those kinds of arrangements is one of our core organizational doctrines, even as we’ve moved toward using outside software generally over the last decade.) So more than a year ago we embarked on a major organizational effort to rebuild our membership system from the ground up, replacing the system we’d built on an ad hoc basis over time. That’s the system we rolled out in early June and which caused some bumpiness. But it was definitely worth doing, both for us and for you.
We wouldn’t have thought that it would have that kind of immediate impact on sign ups. But the timing makes it clear that it had at least some impact. That was about two weeks in advance of “the debate.” We’ve also had a lot of people who signed up after the debate. They’ve told us that they found the steadiness of our coverage and distance from the standard narratives of the dominant national media especially valuable during such a harrowing period. We’ve also had some other publications highlight our work and suggest people subscribe. So it’s a combination of all these things at once. Some of it an easier to use system to sign up, some of it is the news and our coverage of it, some of it is other publications highlighting that same coverage.
Whatever it is and which ever reason you chose to join, thank you so much for becoming part of our community and supporting our work.
