Our
Patreon has kinda stopped growing.
We have about 330 patrons who are donating a total of about $4k per month, which is amazing! I cannot thank you folks enough. But, you know, more would... help more. Lots of people signed up in January, but since the beginning of March, the number of patrons has stayed basically the same.
So, I need to promote it! Apparently the intrusive "donation" box that exists at the top of basically every page on the site isn't doing the job. (How annoying is that thing, anyway? A little, or super?)
So anyway, we need a poster, a slogan, and we need to run some ads.
But I'm completely at a loss for a slogan, or for a design for the poster. Maybe that's because the most boring possible slogan, "Support DNA Lounge", really is the ideal one, and I'm hoping in vain to come up with something more clever. But I still don't know what graphic to put on that other than our logo.
The ideal slogan would be something clever and pithy that says in three to five words, "Give us your money so that we can stay open and keep doing the kinds of things that you like".
Someone suggested the slogan, "Remember why you moved here?" and I loved that at first, until it was pointed out that it's easy for someone to self-consciously interpret that as an accusation along the lines of, "you don't go out any more so this is your fault". (Probably because they feel guilty about that very thing, but still.)
Got any ideas?
I suppose the Patreon page itself isn't terribly engaging, which might be a reason people aren't signing up? I rarely post there, because when I have something to say... I just post it here, on this blog. When I have something Patreon-specific to say, like this, it doesn't generally make sense to me to go out of my way to make it so that fewer people see it.
So I guess I could post blog entries there first, adding artificial scarcity, but that really rubs me the wrong way. I could cross-post to both, I suppose, but I would assume wouldn't people who are interested already read this blog by other means. I asked over on the Patreon what people thought about crossposting, and of the few who responded, most were against.
Also Patreon posts can't have arbitrary HTML and embedded images and so on (just one image at the top) so that's annoying.
Relatedly --
We have this "Street Team" Facebook group with a bit over a hundred members who have expressed their interest in helping out. We've taken almost no advantage of that. Every now and then at our staff meetings, I ask my managers, "Are any of these tasks something we could point some volunteers at?" and they always tell me no. I don't know how to get over that hurdle and say "yes" to these people who are offering to help.
I have this habit, you may have noticed, of writing really long posts here hitting like five different topics at once. I sit down to write one thing and then the floodgates open. Which is fine, I guess, except it makes these posts really long and probably hits the tl;dr limit of some people; and also it means that in the future when I link back to an old post, the part I want to link to is usually sandwiched between some irrelevant other stuff.
So I'm gonna try to stop doing that, cut this short, and save all the other stuff that I wrote for later.
But one last thing! We have two events coming up this week that I'm excited about: Astronomy on Tap on Tuesday: the first one was really fun! You like exoplanets. It's free, and it's an early show.
Then on Friday, Mercury Soul. The last one was a really interesting mix of dance music and modern classical, and Zoë Keating is performing at this week's installment -- she's fantastic.
Look at me promote. I'm promoting.
Hey, photos:
Future Holotape + Xenocircuit
The snark is strong with this one.
