Posted by Pinky.
Our computer server that holds the Pinky Show website crashed on Friday due to some kind of hardware malfunction. As you can see our website is now back online, but my last diary entry got lost. I got all grumpy because that entry was actually a long one and it took me a long time to write.
So anyway, just in case you missed it, here is a not-as-carefully-written summary (a.k.a. the "financial report"):
• After carefully reviewing our 2006 accounting records, Mimi has determined that The Pinky Show project is not financially sustainable. We either need to find a way to pay our bills or shut down.
• We currently have a small group of very generous individuals who have taken it upon themselves to keep The Pinky Show alive. But except for these donors, we basically receive no donations. Since launching this website the amount of visitors we receive has grown tremendously every month. However, comparing the site traffic data to donations records, Mimi estimates that more than 99.9% of our visitors don't make donations. (yikes!) So although we do have a few very faithful supporters, we also haven't come close to being able to sustain The Pinky Show through donations from the viewing public in general.
• Bunny is almost done with The Pinky Show Online Store. Not that we think we're going to sell tons of t-shirts or posters or whatever; this is actually just something we wanted to do because we thought it'd be cool to have our own online store.
• Up till now we've been paying our bills by working various 'side jobs' unrelated to The Pinky Show. For example, Bunny and I have worked with an independent publisher on a number of educational projects; Bunny has built a few websites for some non-profits, artists, and so on; I've done some photography & design work for various organizations; Mimi has been doing research and consulting on health-related issues; etc. All this stuff brings in some money but it's also been taking away time from working on The Pinky Show. This is the main reason why we don't release new episodes very often. Our long term goal is to be able to stop doing this stuff and dedicate 100% of our time to making new episodes. Eventually we want to be releasing a new episode every week. But in order to do that, first we have to figure out where funding for this project is going to come from.
• After much discussion, we've decided that the most promising option at the moment is to try to fund The Pinky Show through grants. So Mimi and I have spent the past several weeks doing a lot of grants research and writing; this will probably continue until our financial situation changes. Neither of us are particularly good grant writing, I hope we get better as we go along!
• Any time we have to work on Pinky Show stuff will be roughly divided 70/30: 70% of our time writing for grants and 30% of our time producing new episodes. At one point we even talked about the possibility of using 100% of our time to try to secure some kind of funding before proceeding. But in the end we decided that we really don't want to let the website to become totally "dead". So while we'll still be making episodes, our output will drop off quite a bit (by about 70% I guess).
Hmm - I think that's about it. For some reason I still feel pretty optimistic that one day The Pinky Show will find a broad enough audience that we'll be able to work on this project full-time. We intend on keep on working on this until we either succeed, or receive some kind of clear message that there's no audience out there willing to support this project. Making The Pinky Show is really fun, so of course I'm hoping that eventually we'll be able to grow it into something permanent.
Sorry for the lousy report, I just don't feel like writing the same post again, and anyway, my memory is not so good. Now back to grant writing for me and Mimi. That plus Bunny and I are getting close to finishing up another episode.
~pinky