CaryCitizen Reaches Fundraising Goal

Cary, NC – We are humbled and thrilled to announce that CaryCitizen has reached it’s fundraising goal of $50,000. We will be able to continue operations and publishing through the end of this year, and hopefully beyond, without interruption.

One Big Push

Last week, Town of Cary reached out and offered to buy services from us equivalent to the amount we needed to close out our fundraising campaign.

Those services will likely include advertising and marketing on CaryCitizen channels as well as services from Goodtree.Studio, the parent company of CaryCitizen.

“CaryCitizen has been part of our media and advertising portfolio for years, and being able to continue to reach our citizens with local news and information is vital to our community, especially now,” said Cary Town Manager Sean R. Stegall.

“CaryCitzen is also a small business that’s important to the success of other small businesses in our community that can’t afford the costs of advertising with large media. So, whether we looked at it from an economic development perspective or a citizen engagement point-of-view, it just made good sense for us to frontload marketing dollars we already had available for outreach this year.”

Thank You, Everyone

We are very grateful to Town of Cary, and equally grateful to all our individual supporters.

Thank you, Cary Citizens!

GoFundMe Campaign Is Officially Over

We know that everyone has had many uncertainties during this difficult Year of the Pandemic.

The support of the community has really lifted our spirits and we wanted to share the good news with all of you.

What’s Next?

Coronavirus has upset everyone’s life and livelihood. We’ve all had to change habits we rather liked, like going to the gym or the office or eating out.

The same is true for news. For decades, advertising has supported newspapers, TV stations and local outlets like CaryCitizen.

But think of all the advertisers who have cut back on their media presence since the pandemic began: hotels, cruise ships, airlines, events, concerts, restaurants, gyms, shopping centers, retailers.

The successful completion of our fundraising campaign gives us four months to figure out what will work next year and beyond. We want to use that time well.

During the campaign, we had several people set up monthly payments via our PayPal, kind of like the NPR sustainer model.

In the case of CaryCitizen, 1,000 sustainers at $10 per month (or 2000 at $5 per month) would effectively fund community news in Cary.

What Do You Think?

Give us your opinion about what might work to make CaryCitizen resilient in an uncertain future:

• Do you think a sustainer model could work for CaryCitizen?
• Would segments or tiers of support make sense for a community news organization?
• What promotional items would you suggest as thank you gifts to sustainers?

Thank you again for your support!

Hal Goodtree is the editor and publisher of CaryCitizen. Write to him at [email protected].