Scoop's PledgeMe Campaign Finishes Today - With $1644 Needed

Sunday, 2 December 2018, 7:51 am
Article: Alastair Thompson

Scoop's Scoop 3.0 PledgeMe Campaign Finishes Today - With $1644 Still Needed

Dear Scoop Readers, Supporters and Scoop Foundation Members,

The Scoop 3.0 PledgeMe campaign which we have run these past eight weeks has been something of a turning point for Scoop.co.nz. The campaign was devised and led by Scoop's new Co-editor Joseph Cederwall. Thank you Joseph for both your dedication and phenomenal effort - it looks like you have saved our bacon!

Thanks are also due Scott Broadley, whose wonderful design work has helped delivered us a result for six PledgeMe Campaigns in a row, and also to Anna & Jess and the rest of the amazing team at Pledgeme, whose amazing platform has been the critical ingredient enabling Scoop to manage its transformation over these past three years.

This latest campaign was launched back on October 10th from Brittany in France, where Joe was visiting me whilst on a trip to attend a wedding, and where I was at that time living. I am now living in Switzerland having started a new job five days after we set this campaign in motion. My involvement was consequently significantly constrained, placing a large burden on Joseph and the Scoop Team, Steven, Lyndon, Ian, Jackie, Cameron, Gordon and Lindsay who have pulled together magnificently to get the job done these past eight weeks.

And it looks like it has all been worthwhile. Over the past week we have received a number of inquiries from larger organisations which have till now failed to respond to our messages. This feels like progress.

Scoop's logs tell us Part 2 of my open letter, in which I named some of our biggest unlicensed freeriding professional organisational users had a fairly significant readership, including readers at 25 identifiable Government agencies, 8 Universities and the three news major news organisations whose usage is visible to us, NZME, TVNZ and Mediaworks

While most of the larger organisations who have contacted us during the campaign are still considering their decisions, there is reason to be hopeful. But as this campaign finishes today there is very little chance that they will do so before the PledgeMe clock runs out. As I write we have not quite reached our target, but we are close enough to think we have a good chance of making it. As of 6.30am this morning we had $1644 remaining to be pledged to reach our $35,000 target. We have friends and family waiting in the wings to provide this if need be, but would prefer not to have to do so - as many of them have in fact already pledged.

Significant Progress Has Been Made Towards Long-Term Sustainability

Some of you may be aware that his campaign was necessitated by the cancellation of our largest client contract. On an annual basis this contract - with a Govt. agency - brought in just $82 a day whilst servicing 500 users with a tailored breaking real time news service. While this is not a lot of money, to us it has proved the difference between breaking even and not doing so. Before having to close down for the Christmas period and being able to keep the service going as we have done over the 19 summers since we started back in 1999.

And for this we are hugely grateful to the 230+ people who have pledged in this campaign and the 20+ organisations who have purchased licenses. Each group has contributed close to 50% of the total pledge, which is a step in the right direction. Next time we seek donation funding we very much hope to be able to use all of it to fund grants to journalists to do investigative public interest work.

The second objective of our campaign - to raise the profile of our ScoopPro model has also been achieved. After the response we have seen during this campaign, we are hopeful that we are finally on the threshold of having our "ethical paywall" ScoopPro, collective funding approach accepted by sufficient of our biggest users to make it viable enough to become a model for other news organisations to follow.

The 20+ new licensees who have come on board over these 8 weeks is a good start towards our 100 new licenses target - so 80 left to go. As the campaign comes to a close we also have a half dozen odd organisations finalising their decisions - and these will get the 30% discount we have been offering during the campaign.

Once we reach our target and have 300 ScoopPro licensees on board we should be on a solid enough financial foundation to allow us to proceed with the full Scoop 3.0 plan (outlined in detail on our PledgeMe page) with confidence. To do so we will also be needing to renew and enlarge the Scoop Team as we will be becoming a start-up again. If you are interested please watch out for an announcement to register interest in joining the Scoop 3.0 crew over coming months.

Finally, if you haven't yet pledged then please - when you get this message (you will need to have seen it on Sunday) - click here >> Pldg.me/Scoop and take a look to see if we are there yet.

If not then please consider making a pledge to finish this effort off.

Arohanui

Alastair Thompson

...on behalf of the Scoop.co.nz team

ENDS

© Scoop Media

Alastair Thompson

Scoop Publisher

Alastair Thompson is the co-founder of Scoop. He is of Scottish and Irish extraction and from Wellington, New Zealand. Alastair has 24 years experience in the media, at the Dominion, National Business Review, North & South magazine, Straight Furrow newspaper and online since 1997. He is the winner of several journalism awards for business and investigative work.

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