Happy 2019, Perfect Duluth Day readers! It’s been almost ten years since PDD began selling sidebar advertising to support the development of the content you read here, and it’s been more than seven years since the PDD Calendar was launched. Over those spans of time, two things have become abundantly clear: 1) There is a strong demand for the content on PDD. 2) Advertising revenue doesn’t come close to paying for the human resources necessary to produce it.

So back in September we quietly put a donation bar on the page where event organizers submit PDD Calendar listings. Bits of funding began trickling in … $5 here, $30 there … and it’s been a big help. Now we’re reaching out to readers.

Once a month we’ll butt into the blog in an attempt to shake some change out of you. It shouldn’t damage your mouse hand or smartphone fingertip much to scroll right past it if you choose, but we hope you’ll drop us a couple bucks every now and then.

In the future we plan to ask for donations to help fund features on our blog — either to improve existing elements or add new ones — but for now the focus is on our event calendar. In 2018 we published more than 7,000 events, each one edited by a human being. That involves a crew of three part-time paid staff members, typically working with the help of an unpaid intern. They don’t get paid well, and there are zero benefits beyond the obvious glory of working on the greatest community events calendar in the world. You can help improve those working conditions.

If you like the PDD Calendar and have some spare cash, send it our way, yo. It’ll help pull us out of poverty and keep the calendar growing strong. If you can’t help us out, that’s no problem. We’ll still be here. But we might only publish 6,000 events instead of 7,000. We could also do 10,000 if you dig deep into your pockets. So inspire us.

We have never uglied our website with popup ads, animated ads, Google surveys or auto-playing videos, and we don’t intend to start. We don’t publish “paid content” drivel or lists of the “Five Most Important Clickbaits for Saving You Puppy’s Life.” We don’t gather and sell your personal information. We believe the internet can be better than that.

Instead we appeal to local businesses to promote their goods and services in the tasteful square ads that appear in the right column of PDD on desktop computers and in between blog posts on mobile devices. It works really well, but the money it brings in falls far short of keeping even PDD’s meager operation in the black. So we are now asking for the additional financial support of our readers.

Thanks in advance for anything you can do.

Follow this link for more info about our calendar fundraising.