Ticking off lessons learned from the Garbage Patch story, discussed here Friday and in yesterday’s New York Times, Spot.Us founder David Cohn interrupted himself Monday: “Oh, here’s another one: twenty bucks from Northampton, Mass.”
The $20 contribution from Nancy Lustgarten showed up just after $20 rolled in from Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales and just before $50 arrived from Knight Foundation President Alberto Ibargüen.
By Monday afternoon, the pitch by freelancer Lindsey Hoshaw to raise $6,000 (or more) had generated more money than any previous campaign launched by Spot.Us, the crowd-funding initiative funded by the John S. and James. L. Knight Foundation.
The site had collected $4,610 from 96 contributors by 4:30 p.m., just $1,390 shy of the $6,000 Hoshaw originally sought. Hoshaw actually needs $10,000 to cover the cost of reporting on the Garbage Patch, described as a floating mess of trash twice the size of Texas in the North Pacific.
Cohn said he originally thought it would be unrealistic to ask for the entire $10,000 because Spot.Us has raised only about $30,000 total since it was launched last year. But he said he’s reconsidering in light of the surge of traffic and contributions since Times Public Editor Clark Hoyt wrote about the project.
“We’ve never had this kind of conversion rate before,” Cohn said of the rate at which visitors to Spot.Us are submitting contributions for the Garden Patch story. (Update: In a subsequent blog post, Cohn reported that the rate jumped from less than 1 percent to 10 percent after the Hoyt column appeared.) The previous record for total contributions on a single pitch was $3,175 raised for an ongoing watchdog project covering San Francisco city hall.
In a tweet posted Sunday afternoon, Cohn wrote: “Today is crazy! NYT article on spot.us garbage pitch is throwing lessons at us every second!”
Among them: A national or international topic (such as the Garbage Patch) has the capacity to outdraw most local topics; there’s nothing like a little New York Times coverage to get you noticed; personal recommendations — especially from celebrities — carry a lot of weight.
Cohn said he remains committed to the site’s local focus, which is critical to its Knight Foundation funders, partly because local journalism “is what’s being hurt and hit the most.” But he added: “I’ve said before that if somebody took my site national or international, they’d have more success than I have.”
In addition to Wales and Ibargüen, the Garbage Patch pitch has received contributions from Tim O’Reilly, founder of O’Reilly Media, who encouraged his more than 800,000 Twitter followers to contribute after he kicked in $100 on Saturday. Cohn also pointed to contributions from Craigslist founder Craig Newmark and eBay founder Pierre Omidyar.
“The power of personal recommendation is incredible,” Cohn said in a telephone interview Monday. “When Tim O’Reilly tweeted (his contribution), it was very immediate and human — ‘Hey, I donated to this.’ A lot of people just followed and we raised (an additional) $400.”
The pitch for the Garbage Patch also picked up financial support from Clark Hoyt, who acknowledged his contribution in his Sunday column. Such support raises interesting issues for journalists writing about journalism (I contributed $25 to Spot.Us last year before writing about the site in January), and I’ll return to the topic in an upcoming post.
We have made it easy to comment on posts, however we require civility and encourage full names to that end (first initial, last name is OK). Please read our guidelines here before commenting.