Barbara Partee writes:
It's Linguist List fund drive time! (See the nice succinct appeal
letter below.) I've had an interesting time introducing Russians to the
concept of user-funded non-profit Good Things, and by now Russia is making
a decent showing in the 'horse race' (aka Graduate School Challenge) to see
who gives the most to Linguist List. (It's the fourth-highest country in
Europe right now; last year I think it ended up second.) In the US we have
a well-established tradition of grass-roots philanthropy -- so I like to
see UMass do well in the "Grad School Challenge" too! (In a turnabout,
Volodja's contribution has credited UMass, and mine RGGU in Moscow.) And
don't forget that you can enter the competition among subfields at the same
time. The Linguist List folks do their best to make the fund drive
entertaining, but it's also really serious! Do donate -- every $5 helps!
If you want to see my letter urging all international Linguist List
readers to donate, it's here: http://linguistlist.org/issues/23/23-1048.html.
Rooting for UMass and for Linguist List.
The appeals letter:
Dear LINGUIST List Subscribers,
It's that time of year again! We'd like to let all of our subscribers know
that the LINGUIST List Fund Drive has begun!
What if 650 people each gave $100? Or 1300 people each gave $50--and gave
it TODAY? Could we possibly begin and end Fund Drive in a single day?
Sounds like a pipe dream, doesn't it? But logically it's possible. The
LINGUIST List website receives 150,000 page views per week. That's over 6
million views per year. If only 1/30 of our weekly visitors donated $50
today, we would reach our goal. That's one-THIRTIETH, note--not
one-third--of our weekly site visitors.
And that doesn't count the 27,000 people who subscribe to the email list
and perhaps never visit the site. If only 1/415 of the people reading this
message would donate $100 each, we could end Fund Drive today:
https://linguistlist.org/donation/donate/donate1.cfm
So what would we at LINGUIST do with our extra time--besides smile a lot?
Well, instead of spending two solid months begging for money, we would
finish some exciting new services 2 months sooner:
- We're almost ready to go live with a Summer School Register that we
hope will be very useful both to prospective students and to the institutions
running summer schools.
- We're about to unveil a conference registration system, called
EasyReg to pair with our highly successful abstracts review service EasyAbs.
- Thanks to Damir Cavar, we're almost ready to present a text-mining
tool that will allow you to search all LINGUIST issues, and perhaps all 150 of
the language-related email lists archived on our site.
- We're planning a Project's Registry where PIs can publicize new
projects and services
Donate now to ensure the ongoing quality and continuation of our services!
https://linguistlist.org/donation/donate/donate1.cfm
