Holiday Giving: Support Mobile Orchard, Get Goodies

The Holiday Giving Campaign has ended. Thanks for your support!

Every year at around this time I make a small contribution to help cover the bandwidth expense of the This American Life podcast. It’s a holiday-season ritual: Ira Glass shows up at the beginning of the podcast and makes the case for contributing and, because I’m a regular listener, I do my part.

I’m writing this to ask you to do your part to support Mobile Orchard with a PayPal contribution. You can go to the contribution form to contribute any amount or read on for good citizen and get something for yourself reasons to contribute.

Public Radio lays on the guilt pretty thick and then, as an afterthought, tacks on a canvas bag or coffee mug so you can broadcast your good citizen status. Here, the goodies for contributing are too good not to lead with them:

Give Some, Get Some

Go to the contribution form to contribute any amount.

To express our gratitude, if you make a contribution of $25 or more you’ll receive a bundle of goodies — all generously donated by the people/companies behind them — valued at over $500 when purchased separately:

Go To The Contribution Form

Contribute at or above $50 and, in addition to the goodies above, I’ll buy you copies of two of my favorite Mac apps for iPhone devs. These apps price out at nearly $50 when purchased separately:

Go To The Contribution Form

One more thing:

Go To The Contribution Form

Cost Money To Make, Free To You

I work on Mobile Orchard as a full time job. While I’m proud to support the iPhone dev community, the bulk of my work is uncompensated.

I’m the sole breadwinner for my family — see the shameless pic of my three kids. To keep them warm, clothed and fed, I teach one iPhone programming class each month. Put another way: I only get paid for two day’s worth of work per month. I spend the rest of the time writing, recording, finding contributors, doing sys-admin, etc.

Content creation is more work than you’d think. Each article is about a day’s work; articles with code — e.g., tutorials — take even more. Each podcast is a two day saga. We try to publish 2-3 pieces a week, 50 or so weeks/year.

We have a handful of superb sponsors to whom I am grateful. I dislike obtrusive and off-topic advertising, so I’ve only accepted advertisers whose offerings I think are genuinely useful and from folks who are good members of our community. You’d be amazed at the potentially lucrative but icky solicitations I’ve declined.

Unfortunately, the sponsorships don’t cover the cost of hosting/bandwidth. What’s more, I’ve had to upgrade the server and buy better hosting as the site has become more popular.

What’s your share of the work and expense worth? Well, I’d love it if you’d contribute at the $25 or $50 level — those goodies are, well, good. That said, you’d still be a good citizen if you gave the following:

Go To The Contribution Form

Tweet

If you contribute, please post a tweet and link back to this page for the good word-of-mouth effect.

Some Fine Print

Contributions are not tax deductible. If, for some reason, one of the vendors can’t fulfill their part of a bundle I’ll either find a substitute of my choosing or issue a refund. I will send your first name, last name and email address to a vendors if the contribution qualifies for their offering — they promise not to spam you.

Thanks!

Thanks a bunch for supporting Mobile Orchard. Means a lot to me! Contact me by email with questions.