Yes, Fundraising Is Part of Our Business Model: Here’s Why

NOTE: This post originally published August 6, 2020 and was most recently updated on March 15, 2023.

I am once again here to update this post, and I am reminiscing on when we first created this post to explain why the heck we fundraise. That was the summer of 2020. It’s really been a HARD fucking few years, hasn’t it? When we worked on this post for the first time, I took all the questions people kept asking us and said, hey, what if we answered them in one mega post that anyone could reference at any time? In large part, this post can be summarized as the fact that most media that serves smaller communities needs support from that community to sustain itself and that is the way it has always worked and likely will continue to work! Think of your public radio stations, your local news outlets. In a way, working here can feel like working at a local publication because relative to the general population, our community is smaller and tight-knit. Serving an audience of queer and lesbian women, nonbinary people and trans people of all genders has also meant that too often, we’re passed over for advertising opportunities that we could have really slayed at, that I am sure you would have loved to see come to fruition. We cannot live on advertising alone — and we remain majority reader supported, in the largest part, by our A+ members, the nearly 7,500 people who support us and collectively cover half of our spending. If you’ve been on the fence, will you consider joining them?

We want to always keep Autostraddle majority free for everyone; we know that not everyone can afford to support and we need our content to be accessible to the next person who needs us, but our most affordable A+ level is at $4 a month or $30 a year and A+ membership is the most sustainable way to make sure we stay free for others. Our A+ members are really special and truly important — even though they’re in the minority when it comes to our readers overall, you can see how many people they’re benefiting. If you aren’t a member, yet, will you join A+? No matter your reason for being here, or how much or how little you use Autostraddle, your support keeps us here as a community resource. It’s like you’re passing Autostraddle onto the next person.

Check out our updated section on A+ Membership.

Holding 1-2 fundraisers a year has been our plan since the major budget changes we made after our 2019 campaign. It’s actually a plan many of you have endorsed over the years, usually with specific suggestions like “you should do what NPR does!”

Like so many ideas we had in 2019, 2020 challenged our ability to follow through on those goals and our comfort with the ethics of doing so. 2021 was a chaotic year for so many of us, we all know how 2022 went, and in 2023 is hurtling quickly into a recession. We know that a lot of our readers aren’t in a position to support us right now, and that is completely okay.

But we’re also hoping that some of you can, and will do so knowing you’re subsidizing the site for others. We are also hanging on by our bleeding queer fingertips here. This recession is hitting a small site like ours hard already and we’re not even three full months into the year. And yet we are going to try, even if the publishing landscape is dire. 2020 was the worst year on record for newsroom layoffs. Hundreds of print and digital news publications folded, downsized and slashed thousands of jobs, including many independent media outlets we all relied upon for smart, honest writing. We’ve lost Bitch Magazine, Wear Your Voice, Catapult Magazine — spaces that paid queer and trans writers for fresh, thoughtful work.

Despite this, Autostraddle remains — so far — on the very short list of publications who’ve survived and who have managed to raise our rates in the meantime. We raised rates for our freelancers in October 2022, and though we cannot give our senior team cost of living increases to keep up with inflation, we are still here, working anyway. We’ve continued publishing relevant, vital work for you. We’ve continued to create the necessary uncompromising and feminist space for queerness where lesbian, bisexual and queer women and trans people of all genders, including nonbinary people and trans men, are centered. We have continued to work every day to bring in more perspectives and the writing that you have asked for. We just launched a new queer parenting column after you all asked us for more parenting content! Here, it’s all about our community, and we’re not just relegated to a vertical or treated as a side topic on a site that centers straight people. I want this site to be permeable, to be a place where we can have back and forth feedback and discussion, where, even if it sometimes takes our indie selves more time than anyone would like to get the resources together to get something done — we are taking your input seriously and crafting a space that reflects the queer perspectives our community asks to see.

But why does our “business model” require that we interrupt our normally scheduled programming to ask for money every six to twelve months or so? Maybe you’re already an A+ member, or you buy our merch — so why are we still also having fundraising drives on top of having a membership program and a bustling store!? Didn’t we just have a fundraiser? (October 2022 seems a lifetime away, but still.) That’s what we’re here to talk about! First, some commonly asked questions we can help answer:

Beyond that, what does it actually look like to build our business model around a reader-funded vision? We can explain!

First of all, we are, and we have!

Secondly — Riese really spoke to this in This Business of Art — it’s a common misconception that any publication, let alone our special weirdo niche magazine for lesbians and bisexuals and queers, can survive on advertising dollars alone. Publishing has always relied on revenue from advertising as well as events and subscription/membership income. (Here’s a useful look at Buzzfeed’s revenue streams.)

Prior to 2019, ad revenue was generally abysmal due to the market we serve and our distance from the mainstream media world, which meant we’ve adapted over the years to never fully rely on advertising to pay our bills. Instead, we’ve had the privilege to focus on building our relationships with YOU first and foremost.

Because of that, other publications have had to make tough choices we didn’t. For example: The Atlantic gained 90,000 new subscribers between March and May 2020, but because of their primary reliance on events and ad revenue, they still had to cut 17% of their employees in May 2020.

While most publications plan for year-to-year growth in ad revenue, we are stalwart pessimists with a passion for caution. So we’d already presumed ad sales in 2020 would be down 50% from 2019. It turned out that our ad sales for 2020 would actually fall 90% compared to 2019, which severely hurt us.

Our 2021 ad sales, though slightly improved, were still down 85% compared to 2019. On top of that, we’ve doubled our budget since 2018 due to pay increases, new hires, and necessities we finally stopped putting off, like tech support. Like it did for many other magazines and media companies, two PPP loans helped compensate for some of that loss. Our first loan was for around $90k, which makes it too small to show up in public databases, and in 2021 we received $118,000, and both of those loans have been completely forgiven. So that helped, too, but didn’t eliminate our need to fundraise.

However, the publishing and news field as a whole is starting to catch onto the reader-supported business model that Autostraddle has prioritized since day one. In September of 2020, the Membership Puzzle Project (which sought to help news outlets build reader-supported membership programs) found a permanent repository for their research (though they have sunset the research project) with the Media Development Investment Fund so that their findings could continue to be used. They’ve represented a determined shift toward recognizing that membership programs are the future of independent media. Yes, Autostraddle knew this and we knew it early (as early as 2014!), and so did places like Mother Jones, who wrote about it in 2016. And, yes, they’re still here and reporting in 2022. They, too, are fundraising right now (and for $325k) because they understood the same things — advertising, while it can supplement our revenue, won’t save us or any other independent media. We have to directly support the media that’s important to us and our communities, media that’s critical of existing power structures and norms, media that centers the experiences of the most marginalized members of our queer community — or we’ll lose it.

That said — yes! We’d rather not do fundraisers as often as we do, but for now, that seems to be what’s in store for us. Thanks to the people who gave to our last fundraiser, we were able to hire Anya, our Director of Brand Partnerships, who has been hard at work as the first-ever dedicated individual on brand partnerships at Autostraddle. She hasn’t even been here a year, but she’s already been helping us to turn this ship around, and we’re optimistic about 2023.

Like anything that queer people have to build ourselves, though, getting our ad revenue up to a robust level is going to take some time and probably more effort than would be required at, for example, a straight publication. PR agents are always in our inboxes, jostling for coverage of their LGBTQ-inclusive TV shows, but the teams that place advertising for those same shows rarely show up in those same inboxes. You, as members of our community, are still undervalued, and that means we have to work harder, multiple times as hard, to get brands to take us seriously, to understand that it’s rewarding to spend their money here, that your opinions make a difference, that what you watch or what you buy impacts them. By supporting this fundraiser, you’re giving us more time to do just that, with, at last, the help of the person you helped us hire.

We have, yes! Extensively! A nonprofit designation is essentially a tax status; there are a lot of 501(c) designations, but the (3) is the one that allows contributions to your organization to be tax-deductible to donors. Nonprofits (including churches) also get tax breaks. For many organizations, I’d say it’s absolutely appropriate, especially if you have a lot of overhead. Why not for us?

There is one area where being a non-profit would help us: we often have “profits” at the end of the year that we keep in the bank for the next year, but the for-profit structure means our owners have to pay income tax on that profit, regardless of how much of their share they actually took. (Most years, this means we do pay out enough to cover those tax burdens.) At this point we don’t think that benefit outweighs the drawbacks, and we’re doing our best to mitigate the impact of taxes on profits by timing our fundraisers so that they are far enough away from the end of the year that we don’t wind up with surprise profits in December. (That’s why we’re fundraising early in the year in February!)This is all why, after nearly 12 long years, we’ve never switched to a nonprofit model, and why you can expect us to continue to not make that move. We’ve weighed our options and the pros and cons, our mission and our values, and are being strategic with our choice of United States tax status.

The most concise explanation I can give for why we need money now and more urgently than we hoped is that advertising is not going as we had hoped. As to where the money goes, we use it to pay our queer and trans team. Those are most of our expenses! We also have to pay for the merch we then sell, the fundraiser perks we give to donors and shipping costs, too, for our web services such as server fees and the various tech situations we need run a website and publication from photoshop to google workspace and more, and finally we pay people like our tech team who we contract to improve the site and keep it from breaking! We don’t hand off money to anyone else or anything. We’re not making a profit for anybody.

The money we are raising is not extra money. It is going to fill a hole in our budget going forward so that we can keep operating. Our budget is $110k / month, and in October, we stipulated we were raising funds to see us through January — but we made it to March! As for the money from last October — if we have money, and then we pay people, we no longer have that money. At $110k a month (and we paid over 145 people last year), $150k does not last a very long time, though we do make it stretch. We’re fundraising now and hopefully, that will give us plenty of time to work out how to exist within the broader financial landscape this year so that we will ideally not have to fundraise again in 2023.

Last fundraiser, Riese said that she’d never felt more dire about our situation.This time unfortunately, we’re actually feeling a little bleaker than we were last year, in part because of our very imited cash flow and also because we’ve come to the end of our safety nets.

We have a lot to figure out about what’s next for us, how to better organize our workplace and our expenses and our revenue streams, and we’re hoping this fundraiser will buy us some time to do so. Our advertising revenue was up significantly from 2021 to 2022, and if it wasn’t for the recession, we’d anticipate similar upward growth this year, but we simply can’t count on it — we have to be conservative with those estimates.

We’ve been at this for the entire pandemic, and we’ve never felt more urgent. We’ve used the time you have given us with donations each year to improve our sustainability and our structures — and we have. But the truth is that trying to exist as an indie queer media site that pays people fairly to work here is excruciatingly difficult. Even a single advertiser tightening their budget due to the recession is a setback for us. We’re just that small, and this year is more of a struggle than we had hoped it would be.

Nevertheless, we know that with your help, we can do this.

Fundraising also remains the most viable, reasonable way for us to both fund our work and remain editorially independent! We aren’t beholden to a larger company or a foundation laying out expectations. Instead, we can be in conversation with our readers and community-centered, thinking about how we can best serve the people who need us most. We can make all kinds of decisions more freely because we are reader supported and because we are responsible not to anyone who is detached from our mission, but because we are directly responsible to the people we serve.

We don’t fundraise unless we need to and we always try to hold off for as long as possible. Sometimes, also, we get surprised when ad deals don’t go as we hoped. Now, we need to fundraise, so that is what we’re doing.

Again, 99% of our readers are not yet members, and we would love to have you!

Perhaps our most common question from straight people is, “can’t you just ask some celesbians for a million dollars?” So, let’s talk about investors and venture capital.

In the mid-’10s, venture capitalists were stuffing publications like Mic, Fusion, Buzzfeed and Vice with funding, enabling them to offer unsustainable rates and prop up unsustainable business models and staffing structures. They were able to invest in ultimately doomed initiatives, like pivoting to video. None of that VC money ever came our way, because who gets venture capital has more to do with who you know than what you do. In 2019, VC investment in female founders hit an “all time high” — of 2.8%. Less than 10% of all venture capital goes to women, poc and LGBTQ founders. But our lack of access to VC capital actually isn’t a bad thing. VC often demands liquidation, first driving up value in order to sell the company for a profit, either through an IPO or on the secondary market. VCs expect most of their ventures to fail. A key component to venture capital is also close management of the company by the investors. When they’re looking to grow in order to sell, it’s a very different relationship than Autostraddle’s values-rooted approach.

Even outside of the VC space, a lot of the capital opportunities you hear about or have recommended to us are essentially long-term loans at low interest rates. If you’re a business owner who needs to stock a kitchen for a restaurant or manufacture jeans for a clothing store, loans make sense. The money you borrow becomes a product you can sell, thus enabling you to repay the loan. In fact, on two occasions, we’ve taken small Paypal loans to print merchandise for the holiday season, both of which we were able to repay within a month of receiving it.

But we haven’t and never will take on debt we’re not immediately able to repay. The realities of our industry and the low overhead of our business specifically, coupled with our own precarious personal financial situations, make loans just not worth it.

We are open to outside investment, we just haven’t had the right deal come our way. A business like ours requires a specific type of investor or buyer — one who believes in the cause even more than they anticipate profiting wildly from it and who knows how to sell our market to advertisers. Otherwise, putting more money into writers and staff doesn’t automatically create more web traffic or more revenue. Our traffic was actually at its highest in 2014, when full-timers were still very underpaid “independent contractors,” our rates for team writers were one-third of what they are now, and we couldn’t pay outside freelancers at all.

So what does it really look like to design our business model with fundraising in mind? How does it work, why is it sustainable, and what can you expect as far as what it means for you to support us? We’ll explain!

Speaking of 2014 — in terms of savvy, to me, the Autostraddle team coming up with the A+ program in 2014 is proof positive that this site is around because of downright pre-cognitive levels of “business” acumen. The only thing they could’ve used at the time was more resources to put behind their idea.

That’s because YOU give us the freedom and flexibility that can only be achieved by an independent publication. The future is more uncertain than ever, but doing these fundraising campaigns and refusing to acquire debt enables us to never be forced out of desperation to accept a buyout, partnership or investment offer that doesn’t align with our values and policies — which are often at odds with capitalism. Like these:

One thing we can always say with confidence is that Autostraddle values and supports our writers and artists, and works to be a community and resource for YOU.

This fact informs our business model — a lot. We care about the reader experience. We work with advertising partners we like, avoid invasive ads and don’t clutter our footers with degrading clickbait. Life-changing stories and information are what Autostraddle’s known for. We’re aware of our responsibility in our LGBTQ community, and it’s a role we take seriously. When we mess up, we look to be accountable and to take steps toward progress. As a supporter, you might never know when your dollars made it possible for someone to access Autostraddle at one of the most vulnerable points in their life — but they have.

Our size and independence has many drawbacks, but it also enables us to act nimbly without needing approval from a board. In June 2020, we had no ad sales that required specific traffic goals, so we were able to make the group decision to pause all content unrelated to the uprising for Black lives, despite the traffic hit we knew we’d take. We were able to take the time to participate in activism and mutual aid outside of the office and to create resources that earned unprecedented reach, like “How to Never Call the Cops Again: A Guide with a Few Alternatives to Calling Police.” These as well as bail fund lists, abolitionist and other syllabi, and personal essays were actionable and powerful resources.

You can see some of the “greatest hits” of everything we’ve done since July 2019 in terms of our editorial and internal goals on our The Receipts page.

Because of reader support even during a global pandemic (thank you!!!), our team of talented writers and creators were able to do our darndest to get you necessary coverage and content as the pandemic spread. This continues every day.

How did we make it through those first nine years without needing annual fundraisers? Well, one reason is that we were all working for salaries and rates FAR below industry standard, sometimes for no salaries or rates at all, and relying on our full-time staff to work excessive, exhausting schedules. The toll of that work on the health of our long-time senior staff is beyond words, to be honest.

This is a pretty normal phase for a young organization to go through — especially one that began as a group of friends wanting to make a thing — but it was never sustainable, and it certainly wasn’t something anybody should be doing for nearly a decade.

In July 2019, we asked you: do you believe we can do more? Do you believe we can raise our pay and increase our editorial budget, hire more people and bring you better work? And you said yes by funding Autostraddle! And as a result:

Our budget for humans greatly increased from before July 2019. Hiring more people has impacted the size of our budget, but our investments in our team over time have proven that we’re right to be hopeful your investment will pay out huge dividends in terms of what we can do for you!

Autostraddle is sustained by YOU.

We’ve already talked about advertising, but let’s break down how all our revenue streams add up to sustainability:

My job title is A+ & Fundraising Director, and a goal for my role is to take A+ from about 50% of my time to about 90% of my time. I really want to move us to being mostly sustained by our membership program, and to fundraise only for special projects. This might be a multi-year plan, this might never be fully achieved, but it remains, nevertheless, a goal. The facts:

Our analytics suggest less than 1% of our monthly readership has given or joined, so I believe in my heart of hearts that you’re out there! That means that 99% of our readers are not yet A+ members! 99%! And listen — we know that not everyone can support. But if you enjoy Autostraddle and you can spare $4 a month, we will literally evaporate without the support of readers, and we’d greatly appreciate your help.

Our current business model doesn’t anticipate ever surviving solely on A+ membership, but we’re aiming to get as close to that possibility as we can — and I believe we’re closer than ever.

So, it’s not that A+ Membership isn’t working. It is! Just not…as quickly we need it to, and not for a company that refuses to react to that damage with layoffs and rate cuts. In fact, A+ members are one of the main reasons we survived these past three pandemic years. Currently, we typically say we’re hovering around 7,500 members (up from 3,700 at the end of 2019 — THANK YOU THAT IS DOUBL), and safely passing 7,500 members and approaching 8,000 would be a dream come true for this little indie pub.

Bottom line: Every new A+ membership, upgrade or donation to our (very cool) member pool counts toward our fundraiser. AND, A+ members get discounts on this fundraiser’s limited edition perks</a> and SO MANY MORE THINGS like access to pop-up discords, discounts JUST for A+ members from cool brands, bonus content, and the deep satisfaction of knowing you’re doing your part to support indie queer media in a hostile world.

Affiliate income is great and we do rely on it! The rates on our sex toys are especially good, and we’re excited to have been working more and more with Bookshop over the past year — and additionally we even have some partnerships with brands just for A+ members, a few of which are affiliates — and we’re working on adding more. But, to give you an idea of where it fits in, our A+ income for 2021 was 25x what our affiliate income was, so… we’d need to get a LOT more action through affiliate links to have them be a primary source of revenue. They really only give us a few cents or a few bucks of kick-back per sale, so while it adds up if you intentionally make sure you’re shopping through an Autostraddle affiliate link when you are buying stuff online (please…do!) sites like Vox and New York Magazine have entire teams dedicated to pumping out daily shopping-related content and accumulate millions of dollars of affiliate income every year, which we don’t have the manpower to replicate. (Plus you’d probably hate the clutter and product-placement feeling.) They also have the leverage, based on size, to negotiate better deals with affiliate partners than we can.

We used to make a lot through Amazon affiliate links —usually not even from the book or boyshorts you linked to from Autostraddle, but the mattress or the chainsaw or the stroller or paper towels you bought later that browsing session. BUT IN JUNE 2021, Amazon kicked us out of their affiliate program, and KEPT all of the revenue they owed us with it, along with all the 10+ years of data that tell us what our readers like to buy! Riese speaks more to that in this post. So, now, we can’t make any affiliate income from Amazon. That’s it. Fin. (And we don’t even have the money to remove all the Amazon links that still riddle our website so they keep making money off us.)

And, not only is it more sustainable to base our business model on reader support, it’s also more ethical. Though this was frustrating, we also breathed a sigh of relief that we could further disentangle ourselves from Amazon. Reader support allows us to weather blows like this, to make it through even when mega corporations decide to pull the rug out from under us. Thank you.

We’re always working with new partners, and look, we only recommend things we seriously like— but this is just not what is going to pull us up and out. We need you.

Similarly, merch sales are awesome! However, they make up a smaller percentage of our revenue. That being said, have you seen the new designs? Get your peaches tee!

Our supporters are the people making sure this site is here for everyone, and underwriting our costs for those who cannot afford to support right now. Thank you for looking out for the next person.

We’ve always been a little bit different at Autostraddle, and I don’t think that continuing to be free is naive — I think it’s an act of radical trust that is necessary if we really believe in equitable access.

If you look at the chart below, you will see that over MOST of gifts to the October 2022 fundraiser were $50 or less! We got to $145,000 in just 5 days with people giving $10, $25, $50. THAT IS INCREDIBLE.

We’re supported by everyone pitching in! The majority of gifts to Autostraddle aren’t huge. We rely on everyone who can contribute, in a range of amounts, to help us!

In fact, in 2020, the average total amount a person contributed to Autostraddle (outside of A+) for the year was about $68. This isn’t the average gift, just to clarify. This is the average total contribution per person. So, on average, if you were someone who supported Autostraddle fundraisers in 2020, you gave $68 for the year. If you gave more, you know who you are. Thank you. However, this remains both significant (thank you!!!) and also relatively accessible. That’s how we made it through. Just thousands of people giving what they could — some more, some less —and each and every one of them making a difference.

Look, we know times are tough. But if you can spare $30 USD and let us send you some stickers, that’s a big help. We’re just some gays trying to make sure queer media survives.

But, that’s the power of our community, of passing the hat, of chipping in. I hope that if you believe in us and share our values and want to see queerness and independent queer media in our future, and if you want to fully embrace our vision for Autostraddle, that you will throw in a few bucks or sign up for A+ if you can. And, again, if you can, maybe throw a few bucks in to support the next person, too.

At the end of the day, we’ve made this site reader-supported because it’s the most reliable, most sustainable, most ethical way for us to survive and thrive and do this work. We’ve always been honored and surprised and delighted to be able to count on you and this community. We need you, though. We need you today.

With love and hope,

Nico

Editors: Kamala Puligandla, Rachel Kincaid, Riese Bernard