Help Out Any Way You Can

Looking to start a RoundTable in your area? Hosting a mythological event in your area? Have a suggestion how to enhance the forum conversations?

Moderators: Clemsy, Martin_Weyers, Cindy B.

Clemsy
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Post by Clemsy »

We think so. As long as "josepcampbfou" appears in the url.
Give me stories before I go mad! ~Andreas

Cindy B.
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Post by Cindy B. »

Okay then, Clemsy, most certainly I'll keep this in mind.

Cindy
If the path before you is clear, you’re probably on someone else’s. --Jung

Martin_Weyers
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Post by Martin_Weyers »

Yupp! Even buying a hairdryer helps; No need at all to read books just because we need your support! :P
Works of art are indeed always products of having been in danger, of having gone to the very end in an experience, to where man can go no further. -- Rainer Maria Rilke

Cindy B.
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Post by Cindy B. »

Consider it done, Martin. 8)

Cindy
If the path before you is clear, you’re probably on someone else’s. --Jung

Martin_Weyers
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Post by Martin_Weyers »

Thanks, and I wish you blissful hairdrying! 8)

Neoplato
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Post by Neoplato »

It turns out that when you make a donation, you’re actually updating your membership profile. I inadvertently disabled my account by using a different email address than the one I wanted to be displayed. Luckily, it dawned on me that maybe I received an email that told me my account had been disabled. Sure enough, and there was a link to re-activate my account.

I was scared there for a second. :twisted:
Infinite moment, grants freedom of winter death, allows life to dawn.

bodhibliss
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Post by bodhibliss »

Thanks, everyone, for your enthusiastic support

(especially your persistence, Neo - we're normally not so reluctant to take money!).

Cindy - The Living Goddesses already appears twice in our aStore - in the Marija Gimbutas section of the Colleagues, Companions, & Kindred Spirits category, and in the Goddess & the Female category (which is currently at the top of the column - so we can cycle Goddess works through the bookstore widget on our splash page - but is usually a subsection of the Popular Voices category).

About the Bookstore, we are somewhat vague in the newsletter, not wanting to step on Amazon's toes. Naturally, they provide this service to draw extra business, rather than to offer discounts on items that would be purchased anyway, so don't want participants drawing too much attention to the details.

However, this isn't a newsletter going out to every Associate, and is in response to a direct query, so, in the interest of transparency, JCF receives a fee that ranges from 5% - 7% of the purchase price on items ordered through our portal (the exact fee depends on the total number of items over the course of a month). This is not limited to items in our online bookstore, or just books and videos - we've received fees on Black & Decker tools, personal computers, Nikkon cameras, kitchen appliances, apparel, and anything placed in your cart after entering Amazon through our door.

Naturally, if you're interested in a copy of a Joseph Campbell book that appears as a premium on our Contributions page - a fairly broad selection - it makes sense to send a donation direct to the Foundation, as 100% of the purchase price goes to JCF (less what we pay to the distributor - these works aren't free to us). However, we're not selling these items, but offering them as a thank you gift with your donation, so the amount of the donation is always more than the retail price in bookstores, whether online, or the rapidly vanishing brick-and-mortar kind

(for example, the new edition of Hero with a Thousand Faces can be chosen as a premium with a $25 donation, but retails on Amazon for $14.93).

Obviously, if discretionary income is tight, it makes sense to order Joe's work from an online bookstore rather than donate direct to JCF - but by going through the JCF Bookstore, a portion of that price comes back to us.

And then there are numerous Campbell titles that the JCF office does not have in stock - such as the Masks of God series - so by ordering those through the bookstore, JCF at least receives something (Creative Mythology, by the way, is my favorite J.C. work of all time, though all four volumes in that tetralogy rock - and the first hundred pages of Primitive Mythology provide the context for Campbell's biological approach to mythology).

Our online bookstore is hardly a major source of income - fees we receive generally range from $40 to $300 a month (the higher figure, naturally, during the holiday season), but every little bit helps. We've had to look at ways to monetize our website, which means adding lots of little revenue streams and trusting they flow together over time to create a large river.

Hence, the same idea is behind our audio portal to the Collected Lectures of Joseph Campbell on iTunes®. Every time someone accesses iTunes® through our site to download one of Joe's lectures, we receive a fee that we wouldn't if that person had stumbled across the lectures while browsing the web. We're not taking in a lot, but we really haven't promoted the lectures to anyone other than Associates and site visitors. Of course, that's because we don't have the money to advertise; however, our partner in this process, Roomful of Sky Records, will be placing an ad in Parabola soon at their own expense, reaching an audience of 70,000.

Right now, JCF is hemorrhaging money. It costs thousands each month to maintain the website and forums and the Mythological RoundTable program - and that's in addition to the expense of archiving Joe's work and publishing new materials (as one example, at one point this past year we were offered an advance of $15,000 for the release of several lectures on DVD - but the pre-production work required to do that would cost $27,000 - hence our conundrum: even though we'd eventually recover those costs over time, we'd need to come up with $12,000 we don't have to make that happen!)

Hence we've had to scale back a number of books and projects in the works, postponing publication and concentrating on those to which we are already contractually obligated - which again limits our anticipated long term income.

At the moment, we're eating our seed corn ... which JCF can't sustain for very long. Any and all help and ideas as to how to get over this hump and turn this dynamic around are appreciated!

Ad astara, per aspera
("Through difficulty, to the stars!")
bodhibliss

Cindy B.
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Post by Cindy B. »

Does this mean, bodhibliss, that Pacifica offers no financial support for JCF? If so, good grief. Most definitely that's a pocket to be picked.

Cindy
If the path before you is clear, you’re probably on someone else’s. --Jung

bodhibliss
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Post by bodhibliss »

Pacifica is facing their own financial realities in the current economic downturn, and are under no more obligation to offer financial support to JCF than we to them . At the same time, we work together as much as possible - particularly the kind folks at the OPUS Archives & Research Center.

I've noticed a natural tendency to assume there are big pockets behind JCF - surely George Lucas, the Grateful Dead, George Miller, the Moody Blues, Will Smith, Drew Carey, Disney, and other corporate entities and individuals who admit Joseph Campbell's influence must be funneling millions to the Foundation.

If only it were so ...

jd101
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Post by jd101 »

hey bodhi,
i only quickly scanned this thread so maybe i missed something, but my first impression was that if a person enters the amazon site from jcf and then purchases anything jcf will be rewarded.
if that is the case i think that this could be a major revenue source that is untapped. as long as it is cool with amazon, i would think that this way of 'donating' to jcf could really be promoted...my family buys thru amazon very regularly, and if we are talking 5% that really adds up!
john

bodhibliss
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Post by bodhibliss »

Very True, John.

We can't publicly announce that - Amazon naturally offers this service to pull in new business, and aren't inclined to cut into their profits by paying fees on business that's already coming their way; hence we don't post this info on our Home Page, and are somewhat vague about the details in our regular UpDate - but I start all my shopping at Amazon through the JCF Bookstore.

As Martin noted to Cindy,
you can use amazon's search function by clicking the "Powered by Amazon.com" image at the upper right hand part of the Bookstore page. It will take you to what appears to be the normal Amazon portal. However, in the URL you'll see josepcampbfou which lets you know that whatever is purchased will still benefit JCF. Hope that helps!

Clemsy
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Post by Clemsy »

John (and everyone else!), feel free to forward that little tidbit to your like minded friends and family! The holidays are just around the corner (or is time just flying far too quickly for me?).

Clemsy
Give me stories before I go mad! ~Andreas

Clemsy
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Post by Clemsy »

Alas, I just tried the above. I clicked the Amazon link, then searched for a particular book, thinking to link it to a recent post. The search result did not contain "josepcampbfou" in the url.

Am I missing something?
Give me stories before I go mad! ~Andreas

Cindy B.
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Post by Cindy B. »

Clemsy wrote:Alas, I just tried the above. I clicked the Amazon link, then searched for a particular book, thinking to link it to a recent post. The search result did not contain "josepcampbfou" in the url.

Am I missing something?
You're right, Clemsy. I just tried by searching for a video game instead. Once one leaves the Amazon home page having accessed it from the JCF Bookstore, the url changes.

***

Martin,

I was a bit surprised to learn that using the JCF portal to Amazon sitewide would benefit you simply because once I helped run a Jungian board with a link to Amazon, and we only got a small percentage of whatever we happened to include in our bookstore, books and other. I suspect that this is most likely the case for JCF, too...?

Cindy
If the path before you is clear, you’re probably on someone else’s. --Jung

bodhibliss
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Post by bodhibliss »

Oops - forgot you need to put a book from the store in your shopping cart first - then anything else that goes in your cart that you buy earns a fee, as long as you purchase it in the next 24 hours (but, as the Amazon affiliate explains it, you needn't buy the original book you placed in your cart - if I'm not getting books, I delete that offering from my cart after making my purchase). Once you place an item from the bookstore in your cart, click on "continue shopping" and you're in the main Amazon site, and don't need "josepcampbfou" in the url for JCF to be credited.

Cindy - I monitor the bookstore and keep the records of what fees we earn for what items, and we've received fees on all sorts of merchandise that we don't carry in our bookstore.

Last Christmas I did much of my shopping through our bookstore portal, as I buy lots of books for friends & family - but given the affiliate program, I ordered items I normally wouldn't through Amazon, including a DVD player, iPod accessories and other electronics, and JCF received fees for all of those. We've earned fees for Black & Decker tools, clothing, a shaver, and all sorts of other items (you'll notice in the UpDate I occasionally thank "whoever purchased the Nikkon camera last month" - noting the most unexpected item Amazon paid us for that month - to get the idea across without violating Amazon's proscription on detailing the program in a newsletter).

This program wasn't in place years ago, so we originally went through Barnes & Noble, which discontinued their affiliate program without telling us two years ago - which is what led me to discover the new Amazon program.
Last edited by bodhibliss on Thu Sep 24, 2009 10:18 pm, edited 1 time in total.

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