Second Annual Membership Drive

Dear Friends,

Welcome to the OTW’s second annual membership drive, which begins today!

In March of 2008, we officially opened the doors for membership in the OTW. If you joined the organization last year, we hope you’ll renew your membership this week! And if you haven’t yet joined, we hope you’ll take this opportunity to do so, and/or to make a donation to help support the OTW.

We are committed to offering our many projects, including the Archive of Our Own (now in limited public beta!), Fanlore, Transformative Works and Cultures, and our new Vidding History project, for free. Contributions from the fan community help to support these projects without relying on advertising revenue. This year we hope to move the Archive of Our Own to colocated servers, which will raise our costs substantially. (If you’d like to know more about colocation, there’s a good explanation here.) Membership fees and donations will help support this and our other work in the coming year.

Members not only support the projects of the OTW, they also get one vote in the annual OTW board election, which helps shape the direction of the organization.

A year’s membership in the OTW costs only US $10. Of course, if you want to donate more than that, please do! Several options are available, including easy recurring monthly donations: learn more — and join! — at our new online form, which you can find linked from here.

We hope you’ll choose to make a contribution during this membership drive, which will last for one week. Please do not hesitate to contact us if you have any questions about the OTW–we will do our best to answer them all.

Best wishes,

The Development/Membership Committee of the OTW: Carla, Elizabeth, Ignaz, Monica, Rachel, Shoshanna, and Vera

Organization for Transformative Works

13 thoughts to “Second Annual Membership Drive”

  1. This page needs a couple big buttons, one that says, JOIN, and one that says, RENEW. For fastness! 🙂

  2. When I donated, the State menu kept flickering and being un-clickable. If you meant it to be limited to states relating to the main country, that might have been the problem. I think I was on Safari Mac v. 3 (not the beta one).

    Hoping you can fix this. Let me know if you want me to test it again.

    Avi

    1. Thanks for the bug report, Avi! The state menu has a couple of known issues in this version of the donation management software we’re using, and we’re working on fixing it; by the next time we run a major drive, there will have been a new release of the software which we hope will fix the state menu problems, including this flickering one. Thank you for persevering, and I’m sorry about the weirdness!

  3. …is it really necessary?
    Because people NOT living, say, in USA, generally may not have an equivalent in their address, particularly when living in the city. Also, personally, for me this was a problem because of the drop-down menu – the county name I could have used was not listed. My proper address would here include only the city name, Tartu, without needing the addition of the name of the county it is situated in . The name of the relevant county would be written either as Tartumaa or Tartu maakond, but one would only include it in the address if one lived in a village, not one of the towns. I could still add it, but with the drop-down menu I cannot even do that. Then I found something spelled ‘Tartumsa’ from the drop-down list, and got a niggling suspicion it might be a misspelling of my last years’ address submission, so I picked that – but in an (admittedly not too likely) case another Estonian would like to donate – what should they do? I believe there should be an option to leave the state field blank, or fill it manually, or at the very least, choose ‘other’.

    1. Thank you for this comment — we will take it to heart! I know there are a couple of known issues with the “state” field; it is built in to the software, and I don’t know whether we can make it not-compulsory, but we will try to implement one of your suggestions after this drive is over. As I mentioned in a comment above, also, soon there will be a new release of the software we use to track and manage donations, and we hope that the new release will fix the problems with the “state” field. Thank you for persevering!

      And on a personal note, I think it is so cool that we have members in Estonia. I would love to visit Estonia someday. I’ve heard that Tallinn is really beautiful, especially in summer. 🙂

  4. Is there a deadline, or does the membership drive end on a particular day?

    1. Hi shinetheway — The drive will last for one week. (You can join/donate anytime, but one week is the duration of this particular push to build membership.) It started late on Tuesday night in my time zone, so it will end late on Tuesday night (or early Weds. am) next week in my timezone! Hope this is helpful.

      1. Very helpful, thanks! I want to donate, but can’t yet, so I wanted to make sure I didn’t miss the window.

  5. Hey, I’m keeping a list of projects etc that are important to me (in my LJ profile for the time being) and I’d like to have an OTW logo pic to add to the collection. I know there used to be some, but I’m not finding them, are they still out there? Where can I find some? I’m more than willing to host my own pics if there is a bandwidth issue.

    1. I think they arranged it so that you get a link to the page AFTER you donate (hint, hint) but I’ll be a rebel and link you to our graphics page here.

      1. Huh, well, I did donate, and now that I look at the email, it’s not the same link on the email as the other link I can get to from here. Woops!

        1. Hi thecatwasnot — I’m a little bit confused by this comment, because I’m pretty sure that the link we sent out in the “thank you for donating” note takes you to the same place as the link fcoppa posted above. Can you email me at this username at gmail so I can figure out what’s going on here? Thank you so much! (–Rachel, for the Dev/Mem committee)

Comments are closed.
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