Whew! Our latest fundraiser certainly was harrowing. But while we had a rough start, by the end our readers rallied and we came up with what we needed to keep going!
And there were some amazing developments along the way.
Importantly, we received donations from over 4,100 people! Upon consultation with our generous matching gift donors, they were satisfied that we had achieved what they wanted — thousands more readers supporting our work financially for the very first time. And so, though we fell short of the hoped-for goal of 5,000 donations, they were kind enough to offer us the $50,000 matching gift.
But that’s not the only positive result of the campaign. Equally important is how it taught us at LifeSiteNews to deepen our dependence on Divine Providence.
As I already mentioned, shortly into the campaign things were not looking good, raising the spectre of cutbacks. As well, right before the fundraising campaign we went through the extremely stressful process of launching a new website – a huge, but necessary project. The challenges of this project, and some of the technical difficulties that arose during and after the launch, added to the stresses of the campaign.
And at the same time, we have been dealing with some of the recent changes that Facebook has made to its algorithm, which is making it increasingly difficult for us to reach our hundreds of thousands of fans on Facebook.
All of this served to bring us to a crisis point, and prompted the staff of LifeSiteNews to institute something we've been meaning to do for a long time – have a daily morning prayer time together (over Skype of course, since we're all over the world).
Even a couple of days before the end of the campaign things were still looking desperate. Our prayers intensified. And boy did you our readers come through.
By the end of the campaign we came in with $165,000, which with the $50,000 matching donation gave us just what we needed to continue till our next campaign.
But just because the campaign was a success doesn’t mean we’re going to stop our morning prayer! This is something I hope our staff will be doing as long as LifeSiteNews exists.
We're still here, thanks be to God and to you his faithful ones who have supported this work.
We are continuing to make the final adjustments to the website and email, and additional features will be added in the coming weeks and months. We look forward to sharing with you soon some more encouraging and promising developments in promoting the Culture of Life through LifeSiteNews.
God bless you all!