We can't do this do this on our own . . . |
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| The Rumpus needs YOUR HELP TODAY. We're launching a $10,000 fundraiser to redesign our website,which has been running on the same WordPress template since the site launched 14 years ago, which makes it like 1,400 in internet years. Do you remember the Internet in 2009? That was before I owned a smartphone! Frankly, the site is wildly outdated, not mobile friendly, nearly impossible to search, and glitchy with formatting poetry and comics especially. We have a large amount of traffic (~50K unique viewers/month, over a million/year), but behind the scenes, it's mostly generic duct tape back there. It’s frustrating to our volunteer team of editors and the 400+ authors we publish every year. An update is long overdue, but we can't do it without your support. |
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| The total cost of the redesign is $20K, but we were recently able to apply for and won our first grant: a Capacity Building award from CLMP that covers half the redesign costs–but only half. We need your help to raise the remaining $10,000. We already have a trusted designer on board and a contract we can sign once the funds are raised. We need to reach our goal by June 14, so we can relaunch this fall! Your support will allow us to: Reorganize and modernize the site. We’ll be able to highlight and feature content, instead of one endless scroll—what a wild concept! Vastly improve our ability to format poetry as the writer intended Publish original comics with higher-resolution and faster-loading artwork Save us countless hours dealing with security, technical, and formatting issues Finally let us have multiple editors working directly on the website to input content (that’s right, we’ve been managing off documents and emails for many years) Apply contemporary best coding practices to provide more admin and editorial tools for easier maintenance, future updates and releases, and improved accessibility Allow readers and contributors to browse our deep archives much more efficiently Reduce shame when sharing the website with new readers :) |
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| If you're receiving this email, you likely already know about The Rumpus, but here's a brief overview just in case . . . Founded in 2009, The Rumpus is one of the longest-running online literary magazines around. We’ve been independent since the start, which means we're not connected with any academic institution or part of a larger publishing company and the vast majority of the magazine’s funding comes from reader support. Writers who we published early in their careers – including Cheryl Strayed, Roxane Gay, Samantha Irby, and Ada Limón – helped establish the site as a place to find great risk-taking writing. Currently, over 90% of the contributors we publish come through our no-fee open reading periods, which means they were not solicited and we're often one of their first major bylines. Our magazine publishes original work 5 days a week. We're primarily volunteer-run and focus on publishing emerging and historically underrepresented voices. In recent years, we’ve paid special attention to the latter demographic with the addition of our Rumpus Original Poetry section as well as columns dedicated to marginalized writers such as ENOUGH (devoted to creating a dedicated space for essays, poetry, and fiction by women, trans, and nonbinary people that engage with rape culture, sexual assault, and domestic violence), Voices on Addiction (devoted to personal narratives of addiction), and We Are More (for Southwest Asian and North African (SWANA) and SWANA diaspora writers). We are committed to supporting the literary community at large, and also regularly publish interviews with authors and book reviews of both poetry and prose titles. In early 2022, Alyson Sinclair became the Publisher/Owner of The Rumpus. The previous Publisher/Owner, Marisa Siegel, acquired the magazine in 2017, and after 5 years of relentlessly hard volunteer work to stabilize its reputation and finances, she had to step away to take a full-time paying position. Alyson's 2nd job (the one that pays) is as a freelance literary publicist. There's no secret money or big investors. Everyone at the magazine feels charged with both honoring the magazine’s deep archives AND making sure the space continues to be viable for new literary voices. This isn't possible without the magazine's incredible volunteer editors and readers, our contributors, and reader support. ALL funds raised will directly support the magazine’s website redesign and our future. If we somehow surpass our goal, we’ll put any extra towards commissioning new art for our columns and other wish list improvements that will help bring additional attention to the writers we publish! We’re asking our readers and the literary community to show our volunteer staff and the thousands of writers the magazine has published that you value the work The Rumpus does. Please tag us on Twitter and Instagram @the_rumpus if you GIVE! We'd love to share why you're supporting us. Gifts at any level are appreciated and sharing this campaign with your fellow readers is a bonus. If even half of the people who opted into our emails gave at least $1 we'd hit this goal immediately. Please support us now if you can! |
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