Your ELi: Why Does ELi Need Money?

A week from today, ELi officially launches a new fundraising push in the hopes we can raise enough money to keep the organization going through the end of June. So I thought that for “Your ELi” this week, I’d answer a question I sometimes get: Why does ELi need money?

Why does carefully reporting the “who, what, when, where, how, and why” of our City and its people cost money?

Let’s break it down by category.

Website technology: ELi provides news and factual information about East Lansing via a website that is free to everyone. You never have to pay or give up any personal information to read material at ELi. People who have never run a website like ELi’s and who use “free” sites like Facebook and Google think that having a well-functioning website shouldn’t cost us money. It looks simple.

What you don’t see when you come to ELi is all the backstage (long-in only) operations at our site that allow us to work collaboratively as a group of decentralized editors. Those of us who function as editors have to do a bunch of work with each other to keep track of who is working on what and to function as secondary editors for each other when we also function as reporters. (All ELi articles have to go through a “second set of eyes” to check for conformity to our standards of clarity, nonpartisanship, and non-editorializing.) We editors have to be able to access each other’s work in case someone lets us know about an error and the original editor is offline. We have to be able to create documents and calendar links and search options that function seamlessly for our users.

We also have to deal with protection against hackers, upgrades to the software, secure backups to our files—the kinds of thing companies like Facebook and Google provide you for “free” because they use your personal information for marketing. Those sites also benefit from gigantic volume where “little” users like you have the economics carried by the big users like corporations. By contrast, we are completely noncommercial and we are a small operation that uses no marketing or money-making tricks.

All this means that we have to pay for server space (we use the local company LiquidWeb) and for technology managers, two local tech wizards, Lisa Lees and her daughter Morgan Lees. They are on-call specialists who quickly fix things you probably never even know are broken at our site. Our site looks simple to run because Lisa and Morgan do such a good job designing, maintaining, and fixing the site technology for us that it looks like it’s always fine. When the software we use was hacked—a day that even the White House’s site was impacted—our tech people kept our site safe.

Well-functioning technology costs money. Not a ton (in part thanks to Lisa donating her substantial services for the last nine months), but a steady stream.

Editors and reporters: ELi’s content also may look straightforward—another “no brainer.” In fact, that content takes a lot of brains. Incoming tips and story ideas have to be triaged, developed, and assigned. Reporters have to be found, supported, and held to ELi’s standards. Drafts have to go back and forth from professional editor to citizen reporter. Material has to be carefully scheduled so that it doesn’t come all at once, and so that it is timed to be of maximal use to ELi’s readers. All this is done by our Managing Editor, Ann Nichols. It’s a lot of work, because Ann does it right and does it well.

In addition, Ann handles our social media accounts to help share ELi’s work with potential readers. She functions as the editor for the vast majority of our content. She also provides managerial vision, and, when we’re dealing with a story that requires legal insight (as when we’re covering a story of a lawsuit or a complicated regulatory issue), she pulls out her J.D. and provides that, too. Asking her to do this without getting paid would be, frankly, both obnoxious and unsustainable. ELi is a service organization, but that doesn’t mean people should have to work dozens of hours of work for us every week without any financial compensation. So our managing editor is paid a monthly salary.

ELi also pays some of its section and calendar editors to provide focused editorial service, and about half of our reporters are paid per article reported. Our reporters come from all walks of life—some are retired, some are fully employed, some are underemployed, some are working part-time to have time to care for family members, and some are students at MSU or East Lansing High School. All work hard on their contributions, and are patient with editors asking them to clarify, fact-check, revise. We let our reporters decide whether they want to be paid, and we pay them all on the same scale. If we didn’t do this, ELi would be so thin in content and so irregular in production, it would be pointless.

Administrative expenses: I function as ELi’s Chief Operating Officer, and I don’t get paid for any work I do for ELi. Thus the administrative costs for ELi are very low for an IRS-recognized 501c3 non-profit. But even though my work is financially uncompensated, we do have to pay payroll taxes on regular employees, accountants for the blizzard of financial filings we’re required by law to do, and some miscellaneous expenses like PayPal fees for online donations, stationery and postage for thanking our donors, and the like.

FOIA expenses: Most of the responses we get to Freedom of Information Act requests to local agencies cost us nothing. But sometimes—as with the mercury spill story—we are charged to get the materials we need to do good reporting. (The City of East Lansing charged us $676.95 for the documents related to the mercury spill.) We don’t spend ELi’s money on FOIAs willy-nilly. In fact, we sometimes decide against paying for a FOIA if we think it won’t “pay off” for ELi’s readers. But sometimes our noses tell us it’s worth the cost.

So what does ELi cost to run? Not that much, all things considered. Right now, our total expenses come to about $25,000 a year. So far, ELi has been relying on a wonderful core group of about 60 donors to meet our expenses, but we are going to need more people to contribute if we’re going to keep going for the rest of this year. Starting next Saturday, we’ll be trying to raise $8,000 to meet expenses through June of this year.

Needless to say, I hope you’ll consider joining me in being a donor to ELi. I feel confident that if you follow our work, you must believe as I do that ELi is one of the best investments in this town. Our donations are tax deductible, and all of the money stays local. ELi is a great way to support so many people—yes, the local people we pay, but even more, the people we serve as the only news source focused exclusively on year-round life in East Lansing, Michigan. What do you think we are worth to you?

Although our fundraising drive officially starts in a week, you can get ahead and donate now by going to the top-right of our home page and clicking on the yellow “donate” button. Thanks!