I was just looking at our website statistics. Admittedly, this is a pretty nerdy thing to do…but it’s part of my job. In just the past 30 days, 1P5 has had nearly 700,000 pageviews. Many of those were new visitors. (311 of them were from inside the Holy See!)

As our regular readers have come to understand — and expect — 1P5 has become an invaluable source of news and analysis about the most important stories happening in the Church. There’s simply nobody else out there doing what we do in the way that we do it.

And every month, around this time, we remind our many readers from around the world that this work is only possible with your  help. Your financial support of our work is what keeps us going.

I know that precisely none of you want to read another fundraising post, let alone a long one. (Would you believe I have a book sitting on my desk that tells me that really long fundraising posts produce the best results? I don’t get it either.) So I’m going to save us all some time, because I know you know how much our work means to you.

As you know, we provide our content free of charge, and the only thing we do is annoy you with some popups and make a monthly fundraising pitch. You come here because you believe in our work, so I’m asking you to help make it happen. So here it is:

First of all, I am asking those of you who have read this site for a long time and have never donated to consider making a donation of just $1, $2, or $5. For me, $1 is a bottle of water. $2 is less than I pay for a cup of coffee. $5, depending on where you go and what you order, is also less than a cup of coffee. (I ordered some Earl Gray tea the other day without asking the price and they charged me $5.50 plus tax!) If you’d like to give more, fine. But I think the majority of our hundreds of thousands of readers can swing a dollar. There is strength in numbers, my friends. Isn’t what we’re doing here worth it?

Secondly, I’m going to ask you to consider making your contribution a recurring monthly donation. Income we can depend on reduces uncertainty and instability and helps us keep everything on track. If you don’t know how to do this, all you have to do is click the checkbox for “create recurring transaction” at checkout, and enter which day of the month you want the payment to reoccur. See the brief video below for an example:

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve written fundraising appeals saying that “if everyone who visited this month gave just a dollar, we’d be funded for X months.” The thing is, this isn’t just a marketing gimmick. It’s true.

So I’ll make a promise to you now: if we hit our goal this month, I’ll turn off our annoying popups. I won’t mention fundraising again. In fact, if we hit our goal for the rest of the year, I’ll shut the popups down until 2018!

We’ve had nearly 160,000 unique visitors this past month. How many of you think what we’re doing is a worth a single dollar?

Let’s put this fundraiser to bed, so I can stop thinking of silly fundraising pitches and get back to focusing on the content you’d much prefer to read.

You can make your donation right here. What are you waiting for? You can do it in five minutes or less.

Thank you for reading us. Thank you for sharing our stories. Thank you for supporting our work.

In Christ,

Steve Skojec
Publisher & Executive Director
OnePeterFive.com