Since we've posted new diaries today (here and here) asking for more money, I thought it was only fair to put up another one explaining exactly where the money has been going.
When we originally started this, we asked for $800, with the goal of reaching at least 100,000 people. Then two things happened.
First, you guys and gals totally blew us away with your donations, putting in more than double what we'd asked for. My wife and I ended up spending most of Saturday working on the website just so it'd be nice enough to justify all the cash y'all were putting in!
Second, our ads have had a fairly high click-through rate, which brings down our CPC (cost per click); we originally budgeted over 60 cents per click, but our actual cost has been under 40 cents a click.
The result? We're putting ads in front of more people, more often. As of this writing, our ads have been shown 2,690,677 times to 193,243 people; if you're one of the roughly 50% of the Wisconsin residents we're targeting who've logged in in the last week, you've seen our ads about 14 times!
When our ads first went up, we committed $1300 to run them and set a limit of $300/day, which ran out early Wednesday. We've been investigating radio ads for a couple days, but since people were kicking in money specifically for the Facebook campaign, we felt we needed to use it specifically for that, so we put the last $500 in earlier today and it will keep our ads running through the end of tomorrow.
So why are we asking for more? Here's what we'd like to do:
1) Run radio ads. This will cost us $135/day; if we do Fri-Mon, that's another $540.
2) Keep running the Facebook ads through the end of Monday; at our current cap of $300/day, that would cost an additional $1200.
Obviously, it's a little late to be asking for an additional $1740 (which is why our new goal is $2400 rather than $3500), but we're going to see what we can get. We're not the only group pushing the deer czar story (or even the first) or the only anti-Walker group using Facebook (there are quite a few Walker's going to jail ads running), but we do think we're making an impact.
We all know how Walker's getting votes: paying people to support him, lying about the budget, collecting millions from his big donors ($160,000 of which has now gone to his legal defense fund)... We have two ways to counter: get people excited about voting him out and get them to the polls, or convince his supporters that he doesn't deserve their vote. A lot of people are working very hard on part one; this little campaign is our attempt at part two of the equation.
Want to help out? Help us spread the word about savewideerhunting.info. You can also donate here.
6:59 PM PT: Forgot to mention - we have a flier, in both B&W and color, that you can print out and distribute at hunting supply stores, camping supply stores, fishing supply stores...pretty much wherever you want. It's available to download at savewideerhunting.info.