Maximum Fun Drive 2: The Post-Mortem

Posted by Maximum Fun on 3rd June 2008

Maximum Fun Drive 2 was a rip-roaring success. Thank you.

When I started accepting donations, I thought maybe I could get by without pledge drives. Nobody really *likes* pledge drives, certainly not those of us who work in public radio. But the little trickle of donations was barely enough to cover expenses, so I tried one. Lo and behold: people tend to help you when you ask for their help. So I decided I’d try to keep it to once a year, so you guys wouldn’t hate me.

This time around, I didn’t know what kind of expectations to have. I thought maybe a hundred people would give. More than four hundred did. I had to make a last-minute addition to the prize pool, now I’m realizing I’m going to spend like eight or ten grand on distributing prizes… but that’s the good kind of bad news. Everything is great.

If you pledged, thank you. Prizes will be going out over the next month or so. I may end up having a volunteer event for prize envelope packing in a few weeks. Expect your prizes in six or eight weeks. The only exception may be books for those who pledged early on — those’ll likely come a bit faster (though they’re going out media mail, which sometimes takes a long time).

There’s already some benefits here at MaxFun world HQ. We’ve got a badly needed new microphone, and I bought a storage system for all the data this operation generates. It was kinda expensive, but it’s the only way to protect the work. Adding to the five external hard drives on top of my computer case wasn’t workable :). And of course there’s the comfort of knowing that I’m closer to my longer-term objectives: hiring a producer and including original non-interview content in every show.

So: if you haven’t donated, you always can. If you did, thank you. And it looks like the future is bright for maximumfun.org.