Challenges and fundraisers
#1
It’s a new year and it’s been a while since we’ve had a challenge of any kind. It’s time we thought about doing something along those lines.
 
It’s a new year and it’s been a very long time since we’ve had any kind of fundraiser to support Big Blue and it’s time we thought about doing something along those lines too.
 
Let’s talk about the challenge first, does anyone have any suggestions as to what we can do? Usually a build challenge of some sort, we’ve had photo challenges in the past, kitbashs and scratchbuilds have also done well. The last couple of, “Do something” challenges went well to, gives everyone a choice of what they like to do best. Think about it and come up with some ideas and let’s talk about it in this thread.
 
Now for the fundraiser, It’s been a long time since we’ve had any kind of fundraiser, be it an auction, sale, or just plain asking for contributions, but it takes money to keep Big Blue going and we’ve been good at keeping things reasonable and within our means. We do get an occasional donation and we thank you all for that, but the treasury is getting low, we have things coming up, some repeat every year, some we manage to arrange for two and three years. Each time the costs go up and we haven’t a clue how much each time until we start to review our options with our service provider. We have our SSL certificate up for renewal soon, we have our domain name, our hosting service and a few other things that come up that and we want to be prepared for. So we need some suggestions on how to get things going so we don’t have to grovel the last minute, We have been successful from the first day we split from Zealot, Mikey and I started out digging into our own pockets and thanks to all of you, we’ve not had to do that since. We promised from the get-go that there would be no advertising or sponsors, and we’ve kept our word and will continue to do so regardless.
 
Now, how do we keep things going, do we want to ask for stuff that we can auction off? Do we want to maybe decorate boxcars and auction them? (That hasn’t been too successful in the past.) Do we just want to point to the “donate” button and say, “have at it”? We’ve always liked to give back something if we can, that’s why the auctions, but we’ll do anything that works. So, how about posting some ideas here for a Big Blue Fundraiser….

We both sincerely thank you all for your participation and support here on Big Blue, we are proud that you've kept us around for all these years.

Don (ezdays) and MIkey (ngauger)
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#2
Hmmm...for some reason, my attempted post has disappeared.
I just completed a rough check of Forum Members, based on the fact that each full page lists 25 Members. I did not include the last page of each alphabet letter, as most were much less than 25.
The 78 full pages, at 25 Members each, gives us a total of 1950 Members. I guesstimated that half of those Members are non-participants or have  participated only a few times, which gives us a rough total of 975 active Members (and once again, I'm guessing that's a very optimistic number).

If every one of those participants donated $1.00 per year, would that keep Big Blue operational?   A buck-a-year doesn't sound all that onerous to me.

Wayne
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#3
Don PM me a mailing address and I will send $20.
Mike

Sent from my pocket calculator using two tin cans and a string
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#4
(01-07-2022, 09:25 AM)doctorwayne Wrote: Hmmm...for some reason, my attempted post has disappeared.
I just completed a rough check of Forum Members, based on the fact that each full page lists 25 Members. I did not include the last page of each alphabet letter, as most were much less than 25.
The 78 full pages, at 25 Members each, gives us a total of 1950 Members. I guesstimated that half of those Members are non-participants or have  participated only a few times, which gives us a rough total of 975 active Members (and once again, I'm guessing that's a very optimistic number).

If every one of those participants donated $1.00 per year, would that keep Big Blue operational?   A buck-a-year doesn't sound all that onerous to me.

Wayne
I fixed it  Smile

Yeah, about 70 frequent visitors.   
Sort the list by date last visited and it's about the first 3 pages.

As Don & I always say, Anything helps!  And we appreciate it!
~~ Mikey KB3VBR (Admin)
~~ NARA Member # 75    
~~ Baldwin Eddystone Unofficial Website

~~ I wonder what that would look like in 1:20.3???
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#5
(01-07-2022, 09:25 AM)doctorwayne Wrote: The 78 full pages, at 25 Members each, gives us a total of 1950 Members. I guesstimated that half of those Members are non-participants or have  participated only a few times, which gives us a rough total of 975 active Members (and once again, I'm guessing that's a very optimistic number).

If every one of those participants donated $1.00 per year, would that keep Big Blue operational?   A buck-a-year doesn't sound all that onerous to me.

Wayne

Some statistics that I've gleaned from the members list and the back room, we have a total of 2273 members, 2179 that are fully registered. 77 are banned spammers and many are our fallen flag members and others that we don't know that are gone. Out of what's left, 1567 have never posted, and 169 have logged on by username in the past year (this includes spammers and a few that haven't posted). We have thousands of non-registered, or registered but not logged in viewers stop by frequently, I've seen threads have 300 and more views in a matter of two days, (The most users online at one time was 1,005 on January 21st, 2020) I'm not sure how many are bots and spiders though. It would take me a lot more time to weed out the spammers and none posters, but just figuring 100 or so active members that have logged on, weren't spammers and had posted this past year we would need more than a buck a year from them to keep Big Blue afloat. I've not gone through this exercise before, but now I can see why we have auctions and that some of our members are much more generous than that. We never ask for donations unless we are in need, we never expect donations from those that can't for whatever reason.

For those that stop by here frequently, but don't registered, they are welcome, but by the same token, maybe a buck-a-year from them would put us well over the top.
Don (ezdays) Day
Board administrator and
founder of the CANYON STATE RAILROAD
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