Members of the Global Voices community at the GV summit in Kathmandu, Nepal, in December 2024. Photo by Jer Clarke. Used with permission.
Today, Global Voices is launching a donation campaign to raise USD 250,000 to keep our news and translation sites running.
Historically, Global Voices has been primarily supported by foundations and other grant-makers, and we’re grateful for the funding we receive that way. But sharp cuts to foreign aid by a number of governments are shrinking the available funds for nonprofits, with digital rights organizations like ours taking a particular hit.
And it’s a hard time for news and translation organizations right now, with new technologies being used to cut staff and mass-produced disinformation crowding out quality news. Even in this challenging time, Global Voices’ production and readership have been going up, but since we are committed to never paywalling and not showing ads, that doesn’t translate into covering our running costs unless readers donate.
Global Voices is a relatively low-cost organization to run: we have no office, no rent, and few physical supplies. We pay for the servers that host our site and a few other administrative costs, but by far the majority of our expenses are for paying our staff. Many grants don’t want to fund more than a small percentage of personnel costs, because they want to pay directly for activities, but personnel costs are the basis of all our activities. Our staff and our volunteers research stories, write and edit, translate and advocate — and sometimes they also do graphic design or photo choice, social media promotion, and more. That is who we’re trying to support with the funds from this campaign — our community, the people who make the articles and essays, translations, research reports, and podcasts that you find on our site.
If we had a dollar for every page view of the site, we wouldn’t need to do a campaign! And if each of those dollars were a monthly commitment, we’d be able to plan ahead for longer-term activities and be generally less stressed. But we know that not everyone can contribute for lots of different reasons, so instead we can think about it as five dollars from one-fifth of the monthly site visits, or ten dollars from one-tenth, and maybe someone who hasn’t read anything this month but believes in what we do kicks in twenty-five bucks, and someone else who loves translations sends another fifteen and… you get the idea.
We hope that you can be one of those contributors, and if you can’t right now, we hope you still come and spend time on our site, and then tell other people about it. Even more than a news site, Global Voices is a community, and we’d like you to be a part of it. We’ll be sharing about the campaign and about Global Voices on social media, so please repost so more people learn about us and how they can get involved. Thank you for your support!
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