Many of our readers have expressed the desire to help the development of DearSusan through financial donations, and we can't say thank you enough for that generosity. Here's our take on this wonderful proposition. If you like what you see on this website, if you feel that it has added something positive to your life, or if you simply want to support the mission that motivates us of helping develop creativity in photography, here are 4 ways you can help us back 🙂
- Contribute
- Share
- Buy on the Donor's Corner page
- Donate
(if you've landed on this page from outside the blog and want to know more about who we are, please take a look at the About DearSusan page)
Contribute
DearSusan was founded as a collaborative blog from day 1. Most of us, here today, are self-taught photographers. Most of us have become pretty good at some things and we love to share our experience, point of view, and know how. But we're also really bad at many other things. Case in point, I bought a flash with my latest camera and never used it once. It would be great is a flash expert gave all the community some pointers on how and why to use flash on a day to day basis, for example. Even a simple tidbit. We can later assemble tidbits into full blown tutorials 🙂
We know most readers have a special skill or past experience that can interest or benefit others. We'd love you to share that with others.
You can send in photographs in our friendly monthly challenges, you can share the photos from a trip, you can share an insight or new technique, you can write a longform article or ebook which we will place online in your name, you can make suggestions to make this site better looking and more useful. Whatever you want to volunteer is welcome 🙂
Share
These days, Google and the social platforms have made sure that a site won't easily grow in popularity without paying. It's in their financial interest to stiffle organic traffic (particularly Facebook and Instagram) and to impose artificial rules that bear little relation with the actual quality of content (thank you Google).
If you'd like DS to grow and publish more how-to articles, have the credibility to encourage manufacturers to lend us gear and big name photographers to answer our interview requests, the best thing you can do is spead the word! They say that sharing is caring, and that sounds like a cliché. But it's very true in the case of quality content today.
We simply refuse to play into the hands of the web giants so the only way DearSusan will spread is if you share content with your friends and online relations. To the left of every post is a set of social sharing buttons. A simple click will extend our range and usefulness. But you can also email a link, talk to someone over the phone, show a post on your phone ... so many ways to help so easily 🙂
Donor's corner
Donating is a wonderful thing. It helps others and nothing you can do ever feels better than helping others.
We are truly grateful to all of those who independantly suggested donations when the site was rebuilt. And to those who want to help, whether they spoke out at the time or not.
But we also feel that we'd like to give something in return. So, we're creating a Donor's corner on which you can find files of photographs, which you can download and have printed, with no specific price attached. A Donate button is next to the file and you decide how much you want to pay for it.
Files on that page are of photographs we believe are good enough that we'd want them on our wall but not in the highest resolution nor part of a specific project. Selling them in this way can't hurt a future exhibition, for example. But the photographs aren't second rate. They're every bit as good as any other we'd want to show a gallery. For instance, this one :
If you want to help and to start a collection of quality works by other DS members, then by all means head to the gallery pages (coming soon). Sounds like a win-win to us!
Donate
Here are the numbers. Keeping the lights on doesn't cost that much. DS is a medium traffic website (10,000 - 100,000 visitors a month) so hosting isn't that expensive. Altogether (hosting, emailing, themes, dev ...) we're looking at a bit under 1,000 €/£/$ per year. What costs a lot more is the time I spend working the blog rather than working the job (I mean maintenance, creating courses .., not actual blogging, which is my hobby and entirely my own fault 😉 😉 😉 )
Still, there will shortly be Donate buttons in the website, such as the one below, for those who want to encourage us spend more time on the development of the new features planned for DS.
One last thing. Donations don't have to be financial. You can donate a photograph, a calendar, a guide (...) which we will put up for sale to support the website. Please don't give away your best stuff. There is no attribution in the donation process. You can ask us to remove any of your work from the No Price Purchase program at any time, but any amount raised through it can't be retrieved after it has been collected. Plus, we're working on other ways for you to monetise your work! Ways that will benefit DS but will mainly benefit you. So keep your treasures for that 🙂 And any photograph that's really nice but not part of what you would consider a series or a body of work, is very welcome as a donation!
And, above all: