August 25, 2017 at 8:04 AM
2017 Annual Donation Drive - We Need Your Help!
Dear readers,
The SoxProspects.com Annual Drive is still on!
We still need your help to hit our fundraising goal of $10,000 to keep the site up and running for another year. We are still quite a long way from this goal—less than halfway as of this writing, in fact—so if you've thought about contributing before but haven't gotten around to it, now is a GREAT time to jump in and show your support! In order to meet our fundraising goal for this year, we are extending the Annual Drive to run through the end of the minor league season in September.
We set this fundraising goal at the level we believe will be necessary to maintain our current level of coverage and keep the site up and running. We've been able to do this for 14 years, and hope to continue to provide the best coverage of the Red Sox farm system on the web for no charge going forward. As we've stated before, your donations help cover site costs in two primary areas: (1) travel costs to attend regular season games, spring training, and the Fall Instructional League; and (2) general IT costs (hardware, software, internet costs, hosting fees, etc.).
We anticipate that our total costs could approach $20,000 in 2017. While we may cover roughly half of that from online advertising revenue, your donations help us ensure we can cover those costs in order to keep the site going; if we don't raise sufficient funds, then we need to make corresponding cuts. We'll be frank in that we've already had to cut our yearly trip to see Salem and Greenville from this year's budget, but we hope that will be an exception going forward.
To donate to the site, visit our DONATIONS PAGE. All payments are secured through PayPal, but you do not need a PayPal account to contribute. All of the donations will go directly to our costs – while we reimburse ourselves for travel and IT costs, none of the owners have taken any actual profit distributions out of the site's tills over the last ten years (obviously, we’re not doing this to get rich!). Contributions of any size are appreciated!!
We've also introduced a new way to support SoxProspects this year, and that's through PATREON. Patreon allows you to support the site by donating a set amount per episode of the SoxProspects Podcast - $1, $2, or $5 per episode. We provide rewards for each donation level, which you can see at the link above. We've been very happy with the response so far, and we've set a new goal of $100 per episode as part of the Annual Drive. We've got some great ideas for some new guests (and we'll be bringing in some old friends too), and could use your support for the podcast as we work to make that happen!
As always, we want to thank all of our readers and listeners for their support!
Sincerely,
The SoxProspects.com Team