SUNDAY JOINT, 10-27-2019: EOS FUNDRAISER IS ON!
Hey All,
The official rollout happens next Friday, November 1, but operators are already standing by, and with this Sunday Joint I hereby declare the 2019 EOS fundraiser ON. If your credit card has sprung to attention, click here to donate. We are a fully registered 501(c)(3) nonprofit. Tax-deductible!
In 2017, when EOS was flatlining, we put out the SOS and you guys saved the site. Today, we’ve got 1,200 subscribers and a small rainy day fund in the bank. New pages go up daily, and the Sunday Joint is a hit. EOS is stable.
But we could be doing so much more. I’m a full-time EOS employee, developer Mark Augias is part-time, and that’s it for staff. This year’s fundraiser is mostly about getting another pair of hands involved. $50K in combined donations and new subscriptions gets us a new part-time person and throws some more hours Mark’s way. $100K gets us a full-timer, more hours for Mark, and a small raise for me—I’m doing EOS for $30K a year and I’d be lying to say I’m not angling for a pay bump.
What’s on our to-do list for 2020? Apart from creating and improving the pages you already know (Encyclopedia of Surfing, History of Surfing, Above the Roar), we’ve just added beta versions for two new EOS areas: Surfboards and Contests. Click here to see a Surfboard page, and here for a Contest page. Both environments are already functional and integrated with the rest of the site, but they need hundreds of pages to really lift off—which means added work hours, which means staffing up.
Meanwhile, we’re still doing the non-sexy stuff: digitizing movies and videos, scanning old surf mags, tagging, keywording, databasing. The preservation work isn’t glamorous, but it’s the most important thing EOS does. We gotta grab this stuff now. When the last analog version of a surf movie or magazine disappears or is forgotten, that’s it, game over, kiss it goodbye. So again, more hands at EOS means more surf history and culture saved from the abyss.
A huge thanks to everybody reading this, all you subscribers and supporters, who have kept EOS going these past few years. Building this site is a privilege and a joy, and while I hope we rake in a Lotto-winning amount of money over the next two weeks, to be honest I’ll keep doing EOS even if it just means keeping the core group—you guys—stoked and entertained.
Donate here.
Subscribe, or buy a gift subscription, here.
Thanks again, and see you next week!
Matt
