Fighting Fund
Thursday donors
Robbie Rix discovers an area where there is room for improvement
After seven consecutive months of surpassing our monthly target of £1,000, I am hoping we can make it eight in a row and end 2009 on a high.
And I must say that exactly £200 raised in the first two days of December is not bad going. However, I do have to point out that every penny of that total came in the form of standing orders - and a good number of them come in on the first of the month! Amongst them are JT’s £50, PM’s £30, plus £25 from DB and £20 from SD. Thanks to all four, not to mention all the other smaller standing orders.
Strangely, however, I came away from this week’s mailbag empty-handed, and I was also disappointed not to receive any donations via our website. Talking of which, the number of online readers of the Weekly Worker is now back up to where it was just before our website crashed last spring - somewhere between 13,000 and 15,000 every week. Over the last seven days, for example, the exact total was 13,313. But this is quite a bit down on the figures we were pulling in during 2008, when we regularly attracted more than 20,000 visitors.
However, an average of just three or four online contributions to our fighting fund each week is not much to shout about, whether the readership is 13,000 or 23,000, and this is an area where I am very keen to see an improvement.
And why not? I know for a fact that hundreds of those readers very much appreciate their paper - one clue lies in the fact that most of them drop in on our site on a Thursday, when they know the new paper will be up. So how about it, comrades? Are you amongst them? Ever thought of becoming a Thursday donor?
