Good karma can indeed be yours!

Worldchanging is a nonprofit, which means we rely on your contributions to fund our work. Generally, we don't make many requests: in fact, this is our only pledge drive this year. But your support is vital.

Let us put what we do in perspective. Over this last year, we've published 1,981 articles (it'll be over 2,000 by the end of the year) -- content which has won much acclaim and a number of awards, as well as a Webby nomination for Best Magazine. About 2.5 million people read our work this year. About 5,000 comments were left on our posts. Our book has been translated, critically acclaimed and widely embraced. Worldchangers did about 70 speaking engagements and over 300 media interviews. Work first published here was reprinted in a huge array of publications. We also did a bunch of community service, including everything from jurying student competitions to conducting an experiment in local community-based sustainability blogging. And we have a LOT more lined up for 2008.

In short, we're a pretty damn effective nonprofit.

And we do all this on a shoestring. This year we spent just $256,711. That paid for all our editorial and organizational staff and freelancers, technical support, bandwidth, bookkeeping, legal, rent, office supplies, computers, phones, a copier, travel, business cards, FedEx -- the whole shebang of an organization.

Denis Hayes has said that our budget would be a rounding error to most big NGOs. To put into context how small our quarter-million dollar budget actually is, the Nature Conservancy (a group we admire) last year spent more than 26 times our annual budget on furniture and fixtures. The Acumen Fund (another group we think well of) spent $300,000 in 2005 on outreach. These groups don't waste money: we just spend ours incredibly carefully.

We're asking you to make a commitment to helping Worldchanging do more in 2008 by making a recurring monthly donation. It can be small, like ten or twenty dollars, if that's all you can afford (though if you can give more, please do). Our goal is a total of 200 recurring donations by the end of the year.

Please consider stepping up and expressing your desire to see Worldchanging's work continue by pledging your support today.

(Creative Commons image credit)

Fundraising: (I did $50!

-Give thanks in person. Like public radio, folks like to hear their names and feel good about tossing in some loot.

-Make it fun. The hokier the better. The 1000th contributor in January gets a world changing book autographed by the World Changing staff.

-Make it periodic. Decide you're going to ask for money twice a year, let folks know your goal, set a time limit, show a thermometer with the progress each day. Get the users to feel part of it.

Posted by: Dan Mulholland on December 19, 2007 6:27 PM

Hi - it's exciting to see all that WorldChanging has accomplished, and we appreciate being part of this community. I wanted to suggest that instead of focusing on how much more efficient you are than your peers (especially because we, too, spend our resources very carefully) that you stay focused on the impact you achieve over your costs. When it comes to changing the world, it is hard to know how knowledge and content ultimately lead to change, but we, too, aim to translate powerful ideas into action than can lead to the change we all want to see. In all of this work, we hope you'll consider us a supportive colleague, and not just a benchmark.

Posted by: Yasmina Zaidman on December 21, 2007 10:26 AM

Please note that comments will remain open for only 14 days after the article is posted. While previous comments will remain visible, attempts to post new comments after this period will fail. This helps stop comment spam, so your forebearance is appreciated.

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