Afternoon, all! Although I am also on the Dev team, my day to day role is actually much more heavily weighted towards our Admin team because I serve as the President of Grafeas Group, the nonprofit organization that we formed to be the financial sponsor of TranscribersOfReddit. Today's meta is all about fundraising and other stuff that you don't normally get to see!
Fundraising is the largest part of my job, because all of the money that we get through donations and merchandise is put back into the subreddit and equipment needed to make all this work. We currently take in money from four places:
GitHub Sponsors -- $90/month
Patreon -- $54/month
grafeas.org -- super variable, but ~$5/month
Etsy -- see below
Speaking of Etsy, we recently launched our merch store after over a year of planning and it went tremendously well! We don't make very much on each sale, but it's a great opportunity for you to rep your favorite org if you want to :) Since launching, we've had a little over $1200 in sales which translates to $167.47 in fundraising with the rest going towards fulfilling orders.
So where does this funding go?
Server costs -- $30/month
OCR (u/transcribot) -- $25/month
Dev subscriptions -- ~5/month
Software subscriptions related to the org -- ~$17/month
Alongside the monthly expenses, we have larger expenses that are infrequent, but still do happen:
equipment (like replacing a laptop)
software licenses
travel expenses for org-related activities (like buying plane tickets or paying mileage for driving)
...and really whatever else comes up that's relevant to the org that we agree is a good use of resources.
Also worth noting is how much we receive in services from our sponsors -- across everything, it comes to ~$450/month worth of donated services across GitHub, Slack, Bugsnag, Linode, Coveralls, Cloudflare, Stripe, Patreon, and more!
Right now our costs are covered, but every little bit helps. If you're interested, please take a look at the donation links above (and you can find them all here as well: Donations / Tip Jar).
I thought it might be fun to give a quick little peek at what's coming down the pipe at Grafeas!
work has officially begun on our transcription app
new partnership...?
more coming soon!
That's it for this month's update -- thanks for reading, thanks for volunteering, and thanks for being a great person!
Wanna see how much we've grown?
Number of registered volunteers: 4723
Number of completed transcriptions: 167,189
[Note: there was an error in last month's transcription count and it was too high. Issue has been resolved.]