News

Dear LifeSiteNews readers,
 
I wanted to write a personal letter explaining some critical developments that are happening right now at LifeSiteNews.com. If there is one letter that I hope you will read carefully from start to finish, this is it!
 
Firstly, though, you’ll see that our new, quicker, one-week-long Spring Campaign has ended pretty successfully, given that this was the first time we tried out such a short campaign. We came up short $10,000 from the necessary minimum goal, but the LifeSiteNews team is extremely grateful to all who donated!
 
Because of the short campaign, we didn’t publish the usual, more personal pieces presenting recent highlights of our work and explaining why we need these funds and where we are going as a news service. So I think you will find what I have written below to be pretty interesting.
 
On March 21, John Jalsevac published a brief blog piece highlighting a wonderful, life-affirming video of the development of a couple’s unborn child. More precisely, it showed a sequence of daily photos of the mother’s belly growing in size during the entire pregnancy while her musician husband sang a really joyful song.
 
The piece was posted Friday evening. John, whose wife just gave birth to their fourth child a few weeks ago was looking forward to a relaxing weekend with no plans on the agenda.
 
Whoops! That did not happen.
 
John didn’t realize the couple in the video was Tom Fletcher from the UK band McFly and his wife Giovanna. That, and the wonderful content of the video, brought almost three million people to LifeSiteNews to watch the video over the weekend! Nothing like that has ever happened to us during a weekend. It was incredible.
 
So, most of Saturday, John was wrestling with technology trying to stop our servers from repeatedly crashing. He succeeded. But talk about stress!
 
This ended up being our most-read and watched story – ever, and double the views of our last most read. And while this was all going on his Dad (me) was enjoying a peaceful weekend on a retreat with no computer access.
 
Anyway, the point of the story is these are the types of things increasingly happening with LifeSiteNews. We are growing in leaps and bounds, but also therefore constantly needing additional funds to keep this racing life and family news engine going.
 
And we have some big, absolutely necessary plans in the works to make sure we will be able to keep up with all the technology, staffing and many other demands needed to handle the growth.
 
That growth, however, means this news mission is having a very positive influence on the culture. That is good news for all of us!
 
On Thursday, we launched a specialized website called Viralvita.com (Cost: $8,000, plus many staff hours). You are going to love it. ViralVita brings special life and family-affirming messages to a different audience – the social media network – in a really simple, yet totally cutting-edge way. Please spread the word.
 
On its very FIRST DAY of operation, ViralVita was viewed over 120,000 times! Not a bad start.
 
However, the issue of how to handle our massive growth and reach more people with our hugely effective LifeSiteNews reporting is being planned with another, much larger now-in-process project.
 
We needed to start this project last year, but just did not have the money. Then, a few months ago, we decided to trust in Providence and go for it. We could not delay any longer! There has been a growing tidal wave of developments on our issues that we need to keep up with so that the leaders and others who read LifeSiteNews will be able to respond in the most effective way.
 
We were blessed to receive a $100,000, one-year, interest-free loan from three supporters that allowed us to go full steam ahead with this $110,000 project (not counting the zillion staff hours required). The company doing the work for us is thankfully allowing us to pay for the project over 8 months. 
 
As soon as we committed to the project, we received two entirely unsolicited $10,000 donations, which just never happens to us outside of a campaign. That affirmed our decision.
 
In May or June we will have a big surprise for you. Please pray for us that we are making all the right decisions. And also pray that some individuals will be inspired to make major gifts to LifeSiteNews to cover the large cost of this venture.
 
The quarterly campaigns just barely get us through from one quarter to another. That is why we always call the campaign goals a “minimum goal”. It’s not a fundraising ploy. We always really do need a lot more. The minimum just barely covers only our basic operating expenses.
 
Major gifts are the thing we especially need for the development projects and urgently-needed new staff and other exceptional expenses. So far, we don’t get enough of those larger gifts, but we are working on that.
 
You may have noticed new names showing up writing LifeSiteNews reports. We are thrilled that Gualberto Garcia Jones has recently joined us and is writing reports on a part-time basis. Guelberto is a pro-life professional who has tremendous skills, experience and knowledge related to the Latin American scene. We are fortunate that Guelberto has long been a big fan of LifeSiteNews, totally understands and agrees with our no compromise truth mission and wanted to become a part of it.

As well, Fabiola Torres from Chile will be joining us part-time to help us cover many of the critical developments in Latin America.

Jeanne Smits, our part-time correspondent from Paris, France has suddenly become available to be a more regular part of our European team and we are working on that, with the possibility of eventually establishing a French language version of LifeSiteNews with Jeanne playing a leading role. Jeanne's availability presents a very special opportunity that we MUST take advantage of. She is another exceptional, well connected and professional life and family journalist.

Catherine Briggs, a Christendom College grad of a few years ago, has been a new part-time journalist with us since the first week of February. She has taken to the task like a duck to water. A natural journalist.

The young and always hugely enthusiastic Dustin Siggins played a major role for the Tea Party Patriots blog before joining us last November as our second Washington Bureau correspondent. He has really grown into his different role with LifeSiteNews and has become a first-rate journalist. Dustin tends to be in a constant whirlwind of activity as you have probably noticed from the numerous reports he has written since joining us. His reports also tend to get picked up by a lot of other information sources. 

And now we have a couple of top-notch volunteer writers associated with SPUC in the UK who will be writing for us regularly on a part-time basis. We are honored to have their regular contributions and know that you will be impressed with their work.

This was one of many results of John-Henry Westen’s recent speaking tour of England and Ireland. By the way, he is now in Los Angeles taping 24 television high calibre interview programs over two weeks for a new television network. He is the host of each program. One of the first interviews was a lengthy one with San Francisco Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone.

And then in May, we are organizing and running our first-ever Vatican City-located pro-life conference with many pro-life international leaders joining us, including Cardinal Burke and George Weigel. We were invited by some distinguished Italian pro-life leaders who have a high regard for LifeSiteNews, to manage this conference that precedes the Rome March for Life the next day.

Lastly, you may have noticed LifeSiteNews reports now coming from Romania. Stefana Totorcea of a Romanian pro-life news service is a huge fan of LifeSiteNews and has begun to send us regular reports on developments in her part of Europe.

In fact, there are increasing numbers of pro-life and pro-family leaders from around the world who are wanting to join us and help by sending reports on developments in their nations. They tell us that our reports have been the major inspiration for starting their own local marches and other efforts.

So much is happening. The LifeSiteNews of today is dramatically different from what it was even just a couple of years ago.

 

All this brings me back to the results of the spring fundraiser.

Although the campaign is officially over, we still could use some extra help. That $10,000 shortage from the campaign goal at the time of this writing is going to be a problem for us. We were hoping to actually exceed the goal.

One thing that was unusual about this campaign was that we received considerably fewer large donations than normal, and a lot more small donations. That is, the number of people who donated was up (which is good!), but the average per donation was way down.

All this has left us in a too-tenuous situation considering current financial commitments.

So I just want to make one last appeal to any who may not have realized the extent of our needs and who did not make a donation during this past campaign, but are able and willing to do so.

It sure would be appreciated.



To make an online donation click here, or you can donate by phone or mail. Instructions can be found by clicking here.
 


 

God bless,




Steve Jalsevac


Managing Director

LifeSiteNews.com