The readers are deciding: An update on our campaign to save BSR’s spring coverage

Our team is grateful and excited by the response: as of 4pm on March 18, we have raised $9,300 of our $10,000 goal! But there’s more we can say about these numbers.

The huge power of small gifts

The majority of donors to the Readers Decide campaign are folks giving a relatively small amount: almost 70 percent of them made a gift of less than $100. Many are giving $40, $20, or $10.

I met up with one of our writers at a press conference last week, and they said the trouble is, most of us freelance artists and writers don’t make a lot of money, and most of us don’t exactly move in wealthy circles. That’s very true. When someone makes a larger gift to BSR, like $1000 or $5000, it really knocks our socks off. The excitement lasts all month. But we are no less touched by the smaller gifts that make up most of our donations. These gifts tell us something extremely important: people who don’t have the capacity to make large gifts value our journalism so much that they give us what they can.

Ultimately, running a successful nonprofit demands a mix of funding strategies, and even though we have no development staff, we pursue all strategies at BSR: sponsorships and advertising, events, grants and government dollars, foundation funding, and individual donations. But without that big, solid base of ordinary people who value our organization, little else would matter. And that’s what this rush of small, individual gifts has reaffirmed for us. We’re proud to serve so many readers who step up to kick in a few bucks (if they can give at all; we hear from those who are not able to, and we treasure the affirmation of a kind email).

Doubling individual donations

In 2023, individual donors made up about nine percent of our total annual revenue. By 2025, we’re proud to say that that number doubled, to 19 percent. Our goal now is to get that number to 30 percent of our annual budget. Due to a reduction in foundation funding and other challenges, our annual budget has shrunk by about $23,000 in the last several years. So far this year, we’re averaging more than 9,000 readers per week (at that rate, we’ll be poised to blow our 2025 readership of 300,000 people out of the water in 2026). If 10 percent of those readers kicked in $25, they’d restore our budget instantly.

A few hundred of those readers have donated this year. So we believe we have a lot of room to grow in terms of people who’ll be inspired to give to BSR, and preserve our paywall-free professional arts journalism.

What you’ll see at BSR…and what you won’t

The world is full of money, apparently. Earlier this month, news broke that under defense secretary Pete Hegseth (a former Fox News weekend host), the Pentagon spent $93 billion just in September 2025. The Pentagon laid out $12,000—a little more than what we at BSR need to raise this month—on fruit basket stands, and more than $98,000 on a grand piano to grace the home of the Air Force’s chief of staff. In comparison, in 2025, BSR’s total annual budget (supporting a freelance team of six and about six dozen indie writers) was just under $103,000. In my experience, that figure continuously surprises people who know our work, but not our finances.

In the spirit of honesty, we share our fundraising journey with you. Every week, I get inquiries from marketers who want to place paid content or promotional links in our pages without you, the reader, knowing about it. The answer is always no. Despite our funding challenges, you won’t see marketing masquerading as BSR articles. You won’t see research and reporting farmed out to AI, and you won’t see funding drives that drain into seven-figure executive salaries.

There’s still time to join this party

So from the middle of our March campaign, and the bottom of our hearts, thank you to the readers who are deciding that our journalism matters. If you have already given, you can keep that boost going by telling your friends about the opportunity to invest in local arts journalism. If you haven’t given yet, you’ve still got 13 days to join in, or to spread the word if you’re not able to give. Directly or indirectly, maybe you’ll be the one to get us to $10K. We have high hopes of meeting our goal, but it won’t happen without readers like you.

We want to keep this momentum going throughout the month: our readers’ response to this spring campaign has been decisive, so maybe we can keep that rolling to support our summer coverage, too. Stay tuned on that, as well as for an announcement about an event to celebrate with our donors.