The short story

At this moment, 94 people have donated $3,143.19 via PayPal, check and cash. On Saturday I mailed a check for $2,543.44 to the Louisville Free Public Library Foundation, which they received today. So we have done good, but still have a ways to go. If you haven’t donated, please donate today. If you have donated, thanks, and please help spread the word.

The longer story

On August 11, we got Boing Boinged. Here you can see what your blog stats look like when all the librarians hit your blog on a Wednesday, and you get linked from Boing Boing on the following Tuesday.

As a result of the boingboinging, an anonymous donor (someone previously unknown to me) donated five hundred (500) dollars via PayPal. This is astonishing to me that someone would trust me with their money like that, and I’m very grateful. I’m almost as astonished that a faculty member at my college congratulated me today on the boingboinging.

After that $500 donation came in, I transferred all the money from my PayPal account to my bank account. PayPal takes a small cut of everyone’s donation, which is how we end up with that $2,543.44 figure (no, nobody donated $3.44). Once the transfer went through, I wrote the check, wrote a dopey letter, and sent it all with delivery confirmation. It arrived today.

(I know these are tedious details, but I am trying to be transparent as possible without, like, giving you the login for my bank account.)

I got a very nice call from Mary Hunt at the Library Foundation today, thanking us for our donation. I wish you all could have heard her say how much it means to them to get the amount of support they have had from their local community and from people like us. When I told her that we were all moved by the photos of the flood, she said “it was much worse than it looked in the photos.”

So that brings us up-to-date. Donations have slowed to a trickle (two Sunday, one Monday, none Tuesday, one Wednesday). There are plans afoot to get some more attention and perhaps motivate more people to donate, and I’ll post about that as soon as I can.

But if you have thought about donating but haven’t yet, this would be a great time to do it, and help me feel more confident that we’ll hit that $5,000 goal by September 1.

I have a new page with just the donation information, so if you want to link to a page here, I suggest this one: http://stevelawson.name/seealso/help_lfpl

And to all those who have donated so far, I can’t thank you enough. People keep complimenting me on this, and I’m proud to have gotten things started, but I haven’t donated a cent yet. It’s all of you who have donated, linked, tweeted (and retweeted), facebooked, submitted the link to Boing Boing, donated items for incentives (more on that tomorrow) and otherwise got us to where we are today.

Books float at the LFPL Main Library (By Scott Utterback, The Courier-Journal) Aug. 4, 2009

So here’s what I know that is new:

• On Thursday I received ten donations for the Louisville Free Public Library for a total of $230. Thank you, all who donated.
• Library Journal published an interview with LFPL Director, Craig Buthod. They now are estimating five million dollars in damage and the Main library will be closed through Labor Day.
• Then there was this, which amazed me. When LJ reporter, Norman Oder, asked what offers of help they have received from the library community, Craig Buthod said this:

Very strong offers. The Library Society of the World [is raising money]. I got a call from Mary Ellin Santiago. [Project Manager of Gates Foundation’s Gulf Coast Library Project]. We’ve had offers from Cedar Rapids [IA, which suffered flooding last year.] The state librarian has been on the phone daily.

It’s really neat that he mentioned us first. He knows better than I do that $5,000 is only one-tenth of one percent of five million dollars. He might or might not be aware that we are still pretty far short of five grand. But I hope it means that Buthod and the other folks at LFPL are cheered up a bit by the knowledge that a bunch of librarians from all over are scraping up $10 and $20 and $50 donations because we are thinking of them and we empathize with them and we wish we could do more.

I knew donations would fall off today. We saw the same thing with people participating in Shovers and Makers. But with this Library Journal mention, I’d really like to see us hit that $5,000 goal by September 1. Here’s the button and the addresses:

If you’d rather send a check, send it to the Library Society of the World Clubhouse, PO Box 7893, Colorado Springs CO 80933. Make the check payable to Steve Lawson.

If you’d rather donate to the LFPL Library Foundation directly instead of using me as a middle man, please do:

The Library Foundation
Attn: Flood
301 York St.
Louisville, KY 40203
(502) 574-1709

Lastly, Abigail Goben-with-a-”b” and Amy “Jambina” Buckland are encouraging contributions with prize drawings. You can win beautiful yarn from Abigail or “libpunk” merch from Amy. (See their blogs for details, must be 18 or over, odds of winning depend on number of entries, offer not valid for Elsevier executives.) I have been trying to think of a similar promo to bring donors out of the woodwork. But other than “for $50 I’ll take my clothes off; for $100 I’ll put them back on,” I haven’t thought of anything (and I think the nudity thing might be illegal in Kentucky anyway). Send good ideas my way.

• 40 people have donated a total of $1,295.
• Contributors are from all over the USA, but also from Canada, England, and New Zealand. The “World” part of Library Society of the World isn’t just a joke.
• Contributions range from $5 to $100.
• The average contribution is $33.21, but the median is $20 and the mode is $10.

I think this is wonderful. I have seen this happen on a more intimate scale where a bunch of small contributions from a group of friends adds up quickly to serious money. This is the same thing, but with strangers sending me $100 on PayPal, trusting that I’m not going to buy plane tickets to Costa Rica or something.

I think the fact that most people are giving $10 is wonderful, too. If you are moved by this story, give what you can. It will add up.

I’m also getting a little nervous. It feels very strange to be responsible for more than a thousand dollars of other people’s money. I think I’ll call the LFPL Foundation line tomorrow. Unless they would really prefer to get one check a few weeks from now, I think I’ll clear out the PayPal account a few times between now and September 1 and send several smaller checks.

I’m also nervous that the “buzz” around this will dissipate quickly, and contributions will slow to a trickle. I don’t want to turn this into Pledge Week on NPR, but I will if I have to! Despite Wednesday’s great success, $5,000 is still looking like a challenging figure to reach. But I think we can do it 5, 10, 20, 100 dollars at a time.

Speaking of which, what’s that PayPal address again? It’s LSW.LFPL@gmail.com, or use this handy button:

If you’d rather send a check, send it to the Library Society of the World Clubhouse, PO Box 7893, Colorado Springs CO 80933. Or just send your check directly to:

The Library Foundation
Attn: Flood
301 York St.
Louisville, KY 40203
(502) 574-1709

I have one more little statistic. As of the instant I’m writing this, my post from yesterday on LFPL has been viewed 2,002 times. That makes it my second-most viewed post on the site. The top post, How to Annoy Librarians has been viewed 2,003 times. Perhaps by this instant, love has already surpassed snark.

You may recall that back in May, I asked you to join me in supporting Consuming Louisville’s Libraries are Free But Books Aren’t drive. Organized by Michelle Jones, that drive was to by books for the Louisville Free Public Library (LFPL) from their Amazon wishlist. It wasn’t that LFPL was terribly needy, it was just a way to help out a library by buying a bunch of book that they really wanted.

Now LFPL is in need. On Tuesday, Louisville was hit with a really ridiculous amount of rain. The Main Library was hit especially hard. I got most of my news about the flood from Greg Schwartz’s Twitter posts and Twitpics.

So a lot of those books we sent them in the spring are now covered in water and sewage. And so are the bookmobiles. And the mechanical equipment for HVAC. And the data center. And $50,000 worth of new computers. The initial estimate is $1 million in damage, but they must just be guessing at this point.

So it’s time to help them out again.

I have set up the email LSW.LFPL@gmail.com and linked it to my PayPal account. I intend to collect money at that address until September 1, at which point I’ll send a check in the name of the Library Society of the World to the LFPL Foundation. You can just send money to that email address using PayPal, or use the button below:

If you’d rather send a check, send it to the Library Society of the World Clubhouse, PO Box 7893, Colorado Springs CO 80933. Make the check payable to Steve Lawson.

Don’t worry about how much you can afford to donate. My own contribution will be small-ish, between $20 and $50.

But there are about 300 members of the LSW room on FriendFeed. There are close to 1,000 members of the LSW group on Linkedin. I would like to think we can raise at least $5,000 for LFPL by September 1. That’s only $17 per FriendFeed member, or $5 per Linkedin member.

For this to work, you have to trust me. I promise that every dime that comes through PayPal or check will go to LFPL. (PayPal takes a small cut if your donation is charged to your credit card (rather than your bank account) and if you don’t choose the option to pay those fees yourself, so it’s possible that I won’t get the full amount of your donation. I’ll only be able to donate the money I actually receive after PayPal fees.)

On September 1, I’ll total up what we have raised and send it to the library. If you would rather give money yourself instead of sending it to me, here is the address and phone number given in the Louisville Courier-Journal:

The Library Foundation
Attn: Flood
301 York St.
Louisville, KY 40203
(502) 574-1709

Five thousand dollars or more for Louisville Free Public Library by September 1. Think we can do it? I’ll keep you posted.