Your responses blew me away and are worth sharing.

Thank you, MoJo community.   [Mother Jones]( MoJo Reader, I am immensely grateful for the Mother Jones community. Because late on Monday, [I explained]( how our fall fundraising campaign was struggling like we've never seen before, I asked you to help me understand what might be going on, and your responses have been truly amazing. We heard the expected: "Gasoline, bread, and turkeys all cost a lot more than last year," "I think tying it in with the election was a mistake. I am TIRED of this election," "I am literally getting a couple dozen requests per day," and "a lot of us have been donating to individual candidates nationwide since the primaries. I know I have." We heard the moving: "Today I learned that I need dental work costing over $9K (curious that Medicare doesn't cover this...). I'll look under the sofa cushions for small change, but I'm not going to be able to contribute significantly right now because I have other people depending on me and I'm worried about being able to continue my support to them," and so many other folks living on fixed incomes yet still making sacrifices to support organizations they believe in, or who wish they could but can only give a different type of gift: Saying "I care." We heard your ideas: "Don't let every ripple in the Right-Wing pond seem like an insurmountable problem. The cause is righteous and does not need the sky is falling rhetoric. You folks do great work." "What you need to be telling people is what you are doing to expand your audience and reach. If there is a plan, people need to hear about it." Thank you so much. Not only did we get incredibly useful feedback for the short-term, we also heard a lot of longer-term ideas about this work—independent journalism that is entirely dependent on people like you—and our team is making note of them all. I'm delighted, quite touched really, that so many readers also responded to my atypical email, pasted below, with [the donations we very much need](. To my surprise, it raised upwards of two- or three-times what emails were bringing in before. And even though we heard loud and clear to never do a fundraising campaign during the height of an election again, we need to finish this push off the best we can. But since I'm feeling inspired hearing from you all, I'll let five of your fellow readers take it from here in making the case for [a donation if you can help us out today](: You must continue no matter the difficulty. I had no idea Mother Jones was in even worse financial straits than usual. Your email pointed out some specifics on increased expenses that made me think about priorities. Let the work stand on its own. Here are some meatier articles that deserve more attention: [She Never Hurt Her Kids. So Why Is a Mother Serving More Time Than the Man Who Abused Her Daughter?]( [The Right-Wing Attack on Public Education Began in One Elite Illinois High School]( [Pay Attention to These Insanely Important District Attorney Races]( I really like how one sentence each from five readers comes together for a unique pitch, because it is the little things from a lot of us that come together and make this unique publication possible. Most all my emails end with "thanks for reading, and for everything you to do make Mother Jones what it is" and it's always true, but I'm especially feeling that today. Thanks for reading. And for everything you do to make Mother Jones what it is. —Monika [Donate](   MoJo Reader, This is a hard email to get right, so I'll start as matter-of-factly as I can, and see where it goes from there. Our fall fundraising campaign is struggling. We're over halfway through it, and so far we've only been able to bring in 20 percent of our budget—just $65,000 in hand. We've had rough patches before, but never quite like this. The emails we've sent have raised about half of what we'd expect from past campaigns. The donations that come in through our website, about half too. Even with a last-minute surge like these campaigns often have, getting to $325,000 in the next two weeks seems damn near impossible. That's hugely concerning. But instead of pleading for [your donations](, I wanted to ask for your advice—and I'm reaching out to everyone I can, even those of who you recently pitched in and those of you who donate monthly. ­­­Because sometimes I forget how much I take for granted. Like last week, when I was talking to a Mother Jones reader and happened to mention that our budget now includes paying to scrub journalists' personal information off the internet because what happens online doesn't stay online. It's routine for journalists to get death threats, and more and more often they are physically assaulted. I don't usually talk about the minutiae of our budget like that, because what could be less interesting? Who wants to know that our legal expenses are up 30 percent this year versus last? Or that through the whole pandemic we had to pay all of the rent and bills on our offices and help people get what they need to work from home? Or that when you read one of our stories on your phone we make about half a penny in advertising revenue, thanks to the economics of online advertising and the cut that platforms like Facebook take? (People are also way less likely to donate when they use one of those small screens.) It's my job to worry about those numbers. That's what I signed up for when I took this after a lifetime in the newsroom. And it's 100 percent worth it when I see how much people appreciate that they can trust what they see in Mother Jones, and how hard our team works to make it all possible. One of those budget lines is for support from our online readers. It's one of the most important ones, nearly $1.4 million—about 7 percent of our entire budget. And it's a particularly white-knuckle one, because so many things can interfere with it. We put our best case for support out there, and then it's out of our control. Is it an election year, when people get sooooo many requests from candidates, and journalism is pretty far down their list? Did one of the many news outlets that pick up our reporting give us credit, for a change, motivating folks to donate? Did we send enough emails to make sure they don't get buried in your inboxes? Did we send too many and turn you off? But maybe the biggest question of all is: Did we—did I—make the case well enough? Did I explain why independent journalism can't be allowed to dwindle at this moment in history? Did I do a good enough job showing how fearless reporting really has an impact? Were we too bold when we put together our budget and bet that people would step up so we could keep our reporters on the beat? Everyone with responsibility (and all of us are responsible for a lot, in our homes and at our jobs) struggles with these kinds of questions. It's called impostor syndrome, and it's probably a good or at least natural thing. If you don't worry about whether you're rising to the challenge, you're probably not trying hard enough. So, as long as I'm being vulnerable, let me ask you: Is any of this making sense to you? I'm really trying to understand why our donations are so far off right now so we can start righting the ship ASAP, and who better to ask than you all. If you've supported our work before, thank you—can you tell me why and what convinced you to do it? If you're not able to or just haven't yet, I'd love to know what draws you to our reporting and why you think it matters. If you've given in the past but not anymore, can you say why? [If you have anything at all to share, please fill out the form here—it's the easiest way for us to manage replies](. I need to know these things, because the responsibility I signed up for is to keep paying all those important bills: To protect our journalists, to keep the website humming, to get the truth out to as many people as possible. And right now, the way I'm making the case is not quite resonating like it should and has in the past. There's got to be a way I can do better. [Tell me how](. Meanwhile I'll tell you one of the many reasons that keep me at it. The other day I was headed to Chicago to meet with Mother Jones readers and supporters. On the plane, I worked on documents with the Mother Jones logo on them. And after a while the lady in the next seat turned to me: "Excuse me? Are you a journalist?" Yes, I said, bracing for what might come next—it's not like most people love journalists. "With Mother Jones?" Yes (more bracing). She beamed. "I've used your articles in my classes!" She was a professor at a community college, on a trip taking students to historically Black colleges and universities on the East Coast. She had taught a course focused on issues of parenting and adoption, and had used a Mother Jones article about the international industry recruiting women in poorer countries to bear children for those in wealthier countries. Her students, she said, were smart, skeptical, and hungry for in-depth information. They had profound disagreements about big issues, and she was trying to teach them how to discuss those issues with solid information, grace, and empathy for each other. If she could do that work every day, I thought, and if a MoJo article could be useful for her as part of it, it was worth it. And when I made it to Chicago and the event with MoJo readers and supporters, it was another big shot in the arm. It was the first gathering we've had there in a while, and it was powerful being in community again—it was also a fundraising event, and I think that sense of togetherness really helped bring new folks into the fold. Of course, there's no way to recreate that online, but I thought baring a bit of my soul and asking our online community to help me understand what's going on might be more fruitful than another increasingly urgent appeal for donations today. There's plenty of time—well, two weeks—for that after hearing from you all. Two final details, as long as I'm laying it all out: Why $325,000 and an Election Day deadline? We break that $1.4 million online budget into three big campaigns a year in the spring, fall, and December, so that we don't have to be fundraising all the time. With people reading less news these days, we thought these weeks ahead of the midterms, with heightened attention and urgency, would be the right time for the fall pledge drive. Maybe it wasn't. What happens if we come up way short in the next few weeks? It's not lights out for MoJo, but if we continue to struggle with online fundraising, we're going to have some hard decisions to make—while still trying to get as close to that $1.4 million number as we can by June. So please do [let me know]( if you think there's a better way to go about this while we take a moment to regroup. Thanks for reading, and for everything you to do make Mother Jones what it is. [Monika] Monika Bauerlein, CEO Mother Jones [Donate](   [Mother Jones]( [Donate]( [Subscribe]( This message was sent to {EMAIL}. 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