The Suspense Builds

It’s time to give you an update on our expansion campaign. As most of you know, we’ve been trying to raise $97,000, of which $37,000 is for putting our financial house in order (which is top priority) and $60,000 is for enabling us to make an end run around the boycott of our trademark ads via direct-mail promotion, so we can continue reaching more and more people with our message.

As of this writing, we have brought in $79,718, which means we’ve reached 82.2 percent of our goal. That means we’ve put our house in order. Hooray! And part of putting our house in order is having sturdier newsprint (not glossy) paper for the magazine, so that the NOR has a better chance of making it through the postal system undamaged. The better paper will commence soon.

But we have come up short on the funds for direct mail — by $17,282. An additional problem is that we’ve heard from certain sympathetic people with lots of experience in direct mail that $60,000 really isn’t enough to make a decent start in direct mail, and that $80,000 is a more realistic figure. What to do?

So many of you have been so generous (in many cases, sacrificially so) that we are simply not inclined to beg you, our readers, for more funds. Therefore, we’ve approached a foundation for help. As you can imagine, there are very few foundations that would give the NOR the time of day, but we have found one which is willing to consider our needs. The application process is very competitive, and there’s no guarantee we will be successful. By the time our September issue goes to press, we should know the outcome.