Please Read and Consider!

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.

Locked
Clemsy
Working Associate
Posts: 10645
Joined: Thu Apr 04, 2002 6:00 am
Location: The forest... somewhere north of Albany
Contact:

Please Read and Consider!

Post by Clemsy »

JCF Working Associates, Fellows, and Friends

We are turning to you, asking your help in a major undertaking for the Foundation.

As most of you are aware, the last three years the JCF website has been dying a slow death of one thousand cuts. The site has become unwieldy, nearly unworkable, impossible to patch. So many initiatives (from fundraising, to streaming video, to strengthening our Mythological RoundTable® network, expanding accessibility for scholars and the general public to Joseph Campbell's digital archives, and so much more) have been more-or-less on hold, awaiting a new site with the functionality, flexibility, and capacity to support major projects.

So we are pleased to announce that the Board has accepted a bid from web developer Onaricom to build our new website!

All we have to do is raise $70,000 by Thanksgiving ...

JCF is a "virtual" organization. We have no brick-and-mortar office, existing primarily in cyberspace. Without a working website, we are dead in the water – yet we have no surplus of funds at our disposal. We will have to raise the funds.

How?

We have a plan (one that doesn't involve knocking over an armored truck).

It is time to leverage the goodwill of the 14,000 JCF Associates who receive our MythBlasts, the 170,000 Joseph Campbell fans on Facebook, and the numerous fellow travelers and sister organizations who have collaborated with us over the years in sharing Joseph Campbell's vision.

We will do this by launching a crowd-funding campaign at the end of September / start of October. That gives us just over two months to organize a winning strategy that we can have in place in time for the launch.

In brief, this involves signing up with an existing crowd-funding platform, developing a cogent explanation of what we are seeking and why (particularly the public benefit), developing rewards to offer at specific donation levels, and promoting the campaign through every possible outlet, including social media (Facebook, Twitter, Google, YouTube, etc.).

We need all hands on deck for this to succeed!

There are two requests we'd like to make of each of you.

1) Please BRAINSTORM ideas for rewards and forward them to michael.lambert@jcf.org

Rewards should be of two types:

A) Physical products.

For example, JCF might offer 15 different donors a Shelf of Campbell (every book title in the Collected Works of Joseph Campbell) for pledges of $600 each, or large photographs of Joseph Campbell to the first 50 individuals who contribute $40 each. We have discussed making the ultimate prize for the largest donors a thumb drive containing EVERY Joseph Campbell lecture, both audio and video, as well as a commitment to make available to them those that have yet to released.

B) Experiences.

Examples that have been suggested in this category (these are suggestions – specifics have not yet been determined): JCF could offer three donors who pledge $5,000 each a free week at our Mythological ToolBox® Playshop at Esalen, while one person who pledges $10,000 could receive the deluxe accommodations that week. A donation of $500 might earn a handful of donors dinner with Robert Walter, or martinis with David Miller; two hundred dollars could score backstage passes for two to a Beats Antique concert.

You get the idea ...

Please brainstorm award possibilities and forward them to Michael Lambert, at michael.lambert@jcf.org

Feel free to be creative and even a little outrageous, but do try to avoid sending us down a rabbit hole. Dinner with Dan Brown or Neil deGrasse Tyson or President Obama would certainly be a major draw for some donors – but unless you know the parties involved and have a reasonable expectation that they would be willing to help out, it's probably not worth it to channel limited time and resources into trying to contact these individuals and persuade them to participate.

But also, keep in mind that rewards don't always have to have an explicit Joseph Campbell connection. If you have the ability to offer (or pay for) a limited number of tandem parachute jumps, or are willing to donate tickets to Disneyland or a week at your cabin or timeshare in Montana or Lake Tahoe or Cabo San Lucas, could comp contributors to a theatrical or musical performance, or provide a number of CDs (maybe a JCF Fellow or two), feel free to put that in the hopper.

Generally, what does not work is a donor reward that requires an extra expenditure on the part of the contributor (if, for example, we offered a 50% discount on The Hero with a Thousand Faces as a reward to those who donate $50 ... which would compel them to kick in extra funds above their donation to receive their reward).

On the other hand, if you do have a cabin in Tahoe you are willing to make available, we don't need to pay the travel costs of those who choose that reward.

We need small, medium, and large rewards (lots of "small" and "medium" rewards.

Please forward your suggestions and ideas to Michael asap, preferably no later than July 12.

2) We need names of sister organizations and fellow travelers (who either currently enjoy a connection to JCF or share common interests) that you believe would be willing to promote our crowd-funding campaign to their memberships. Some are obvious: the Mythic Imagination Institute, Leigh Melander's Spillian, Catherine Svehla's Myth in the Mohave radio show, Michael Meade's Mosaic, Kwame Scruggs' Alchemy, Inc., etc.. Others might be off JCF's radar at the moment – but we don't want to overlook anyone.

(One big plus for these friends of JCF: the new website will offer the opportunity to network more closely with other organizations and/or individuals in a mutually beneficial and supportive way).

Please give this some thought. There may well be dozens of groups we haven't thought of.

So we don't confuse these with the list of potential rewards that Michael is collecting, Martin Weyers will be the keeper of the organization list. Please forward your organization suggestions to Martin Weyers by July 12: martin.weyers@jcf.org (if possible, please include contact info for the organization(s) – an email address, name of an individual, etc.).

We appreciate your commitment, and your passion for Joseph Campbell's vision. Thank you for being here for the Foundation, year in and year out, and for helping us move forward into the future.

Metaphorically Yours,

Stephen Gerringer
JCF Community
Give me stories before I go mad! ~Andreas

Ercan2121
Associate
Posts: 824
Joined: Mon Mar 30, 2009 2:15 am
Location: Istanbul

Post by Ercan2121 »

Thank you, Clemsy for all the info; read and started to think about

Clemsy
Working Associate
Posts: 10645
Joined: Thu Apr 04, 2002 6:00 am
Location: The forest... somewhere north of Albany
Contact:

Post by Clemsy »

Your welcome, Ercan! Good to "see" you! :-)
Give me stories before I go mad! ~Andreas

Ercan2121
Associate
Posts: 824
Joined: Mon Mar 30, 2009 2:15 am
Location: Istanbul

Post by Ercan2121 »

Clemsy wrote:Your welcome, Ercan! Good to "see" you! :-)
:D :D

CarmelaBear
Associate
Posts: 4087
Joined: Wed Nov 27, 2002 3:51 pm
Location: The Land of Enchantment

Post by CarmelaBear »

What happened, Clemsy?

:?:
Once in a while a door opens, and let's in the future. --- Graham Greene

Locked