Friends, today we’re launching a very special fundraising campaign to support the Commons. Here’s the tl;dr: we need to complete the fundraising match for our NEH challenge grant by the end of June to unlock the last of the grant. Every dollar helps our open source, academy owned, community governed platform to operate sustainably for years to come.
We’ve got $40,000 left to raise, which will be matched 3:1 by the NEH, and we need your help to get there.
How You Can Help
That help can come in a few ways:
1. You can make a one-off individual or organizational donation at our Crowdpower site
2. You can commit to a recurring monthly donation via our Crowdpower site (every donation until June will be matched)
3. You can convince your organization or institution to join us as a sustaining member
4. If you are using the Commons for a funded project (or plan to before June), you can allocate a portion of your budget as a project contribution
Remember, every $3 you contribute is matched with an extra $1 from the NEH, so $33 becomes $44, $99 becomes $132, $1500 becomes $2000 and so on.
If you have questions about any of these options, please don’t hesitate to get in touch! You can reach our Community Development Manager, Zoe Wake Hyde, at wakehyd1@msu.edu.
Want to know more about the matching grant, how we got to this last stretch and how we plan to spend the funds raised? Read on!
The Journey So Far
At the beginning of March 2020, as Humanities Commons was nearing the conclusion of a lengthy migration process that transferred ownership and support for the network from its founding host, the Modern Language Association, to Michigan State University, we were delighted to receive notification that we’d been successful in our application for an Infrastructure and Capacity Building Challenge Grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. This grant offered the Commons much-needed federal support of $500,000, to be released to us subject to the certification of a 3:1 fundraising match, to be completed by the end of fiscal year 2024. (Which is coming up soon!)
In case you didn’t immediately do the math, that means that we committed ourselves to raising $1.5 million from non-federal sources — and that we did so a matter of days before the COVID-19 shutdown.
In the ensuing months, this timing gave us significant cause for alarm, as many key foundations rapidly changed their funding priorities in order to focus on supporting projects and organizations whose immediate survival was threatened by the shutdown. Fundraising for digital projects — and especially for sustaining existing projects rather than launching new ones — became all the more challenging as a result.
We were enormously grateful, however, to be notified in July 2020 that we’d been accepted into a cohort of digital humanities projects that would work with the Nonprofit Finance Fund in a two-year initiative intended to help us build financial resiliency. This initiative provided us not only with invaluable support from NFF’s team of amazing consultants, but also with a crucial opportunity to apply for change capital funding from the Mellon Foundation.
The idea behind change capital is to enable non-profit organizations to invest in strategic initiatives and build the financial model that will allow them to thrive into the future, and thus the NFF/Mellon program and the NEH program were perfectly suited to help the Commons develop a much-needed sustainability plan.
Between the support of NFF and the change capital grant that we received in September 2021 from the Mellon Foundation, we got two-thirds of the way to our required match for the NEH challenge grant. We have received additional grant support from the Samuel H. Kress Foundation and the Open Society Foundations, and gift support from Digital Scholar and a wide range of individual Crowdpower donors. We have also received revenue-based support from our member organizations and in-kind support from our fiscal host, Michigan State University.
Thanks to all of that, we’re almost there: we now have just $40,000 left to raise to complete the match and release the last of the federal funds from the NEH. Once again: help us get there!
What These Funds Mean for The Commons
It’s of course important to be candid about what these funds can do for us. The combined $2 million dollars in federal and non-federal support covers about 50% of the salaries and benefits of our core team, plus the same percentage of our hosting costs and other expenses, through the end of fiscal year 2027. This funding is intended to give us enough runway to develop our sustainability model, which involves encouraging new institutions to join and support the network in order to keep us running. That is to say, the funding we’ve received isn’t enough on its own, nor does it provide a basis for sustainability in itself. But it has allowed us to build an amazing, dedicated team that has laid the groundwork for the vibrant, transformative Commons we have planned.
This work has been slow and difficult, involving the remediation of a lot of technical debt, the establishment of some more sustainable development practices and infrastructures, and the creation of a lot of community-facing support materials. There are quite a number of institutions out there that are enthusiastic about our work, but that want to see evidence of our success before committing.
Which is fair! And which we’ll have a lot to share in the next six months. (Spoiler alert: a whole new repository system and site-wide search are just around the corner, and there’s more excitement to follow.)
Over the course of the next couple of months, we’ll report regularly on our progress, both in this fundraising campaign and in our development initiatives. We look forward to crossing the finishing line with your support.