In the past year — from February 2019 through January 2020 — the PDD Calendar published 8,040 Duluth-area events. Each one was edited by a human being before the “publish” button was pushed.

It’s a tremendous amount of work to keep up with all the submissions from the more than 1,000 organizations that have sent us info about their concerts, plays, cooking classes and snowball fights. That’s why once a month we set our dignity aside and remind readers how much we appreciate their financial support.

Look at the crew of five above, slaving away to keep the PDD Calendar strong, trying to unravel sentences that make no sense, deleting excessive exclamation points and generally saving the planet. Don’t they deserve high salaries and excellent benefits?

Yes, PDD does receive income from advertising, but not enough to pay anything close to living wages. We have never uglied our website with popup ads, animated ads, Google surveys or auto-playing videos, and we don’t intend to start. There are no paywalls on PDD. We don’t publish “paid content” drivel or lists of the “Nine Ways to Beat Alzheimer’s by Exercising While Doing Crossword Puzzles.” We don’t gather and sell your personal information. We believe the internet can be better than that. We went 15 years without groveling, but now we do it once a month and so far it feels like the bits of funding that roll in are worth the mild tarnish of virtual panhandling.

Thanks in advance for anything you can do.

Follow this link for more info about our calendar fundraising.