Thank you all for helping with the Library Society of the World fundraiser for the flooded Louisville Free Pubilc Library.

My mom said she’d match up to $200 in donations, and people came through with $195, which is excellent.

I realized that I hadn’t put in my money yet, so I did that.

After all is totalled up and PayPal takes their cut, I count $4,202.28 raised in just over a month by the Library Society of the World for the Louisville Free Public Library. One hundred and thirty six people donated through the LSW effort, with an average contribution of $33.40, and a median and mode of $20.

I set a goal of $5,000 and thought it was a stretch. It turns out I was right, but we didn’t fall that far short. I’m very proud of what we accomplished together, and very grateful that so many people trusted me with their money. I’m waiting for the PayPal transfer to come through, after which I’ll send a (real) check for something like $1,658.84, to go with the check for $2,543.44 that we already sent.

There is still the matter of the prizes. I didn’t do a great job of pushing the prizes as incentives, but we are certainly ready to use them as rewards. Everyone who donated before this blog post is elgibile to win. The available prizes for the dozen or so winners will be:

From photographer Jamie Powell Sheppard: one each of six different photo prints of the LFPL Main Library. That’s her work over my shoulder in the photo above. The prints are beautiful and so are the images. Please click on the thumbnails below, as the originals aren’t square.

Leo Laporte’s voice on your hope answering machine. Leo is the host of the TWiT (This Week in Tech) podcast and The Tech Guy radio show. He’s a pro, he sounds great, and apparently he’s an awesome guy since he just saw us discussing these prizes on FriendFeed and volunteered.

Eric Sizemore’s voice on your home answering machine. Sizemore is a librarian and a DJ. If you want people to think you have a deep, smooth voice or think you are involved with a guy who has a deep, smooth voice, this should be your pick.

An LSW Cod of Ethics mug (courtesy of Nichole Dettmar). Make an ethical stand! Makes everything taste like cod!

Beautiful, luxurious Black Forest Malabrigo yard from Abigail Goben

One item from the way cool libpunk store from Amy Buckland. I’m not sure, but I think my netbook runs faster and cooler since I put that libpunk sticker on it.

I still need to talk to the other people involved–Abigail and Amy had their own plans for selecting winners, which is fine–but my overall plan is to randomly select names of donors to match the number of prizes, contact the donors and let them pick first-come-first-served which prize they want. We’ll see how that goes.