If you’re a regular reader of this newsletter, you’ve probably noticed the Ko-fi donation button in our email header. Exactly two years ago, we created a Ko-fi page for The Friendly Freelancer. Ko-fi is an online tip jar platform that offers you, our readers, an easy way to support this newsletter by sending a few euros our way; namely, the cost of a pre-inflation coffee.
We created the donation page for two reasons. One, we put quite a bit of time into writing this newsletter. Second, some of you had asked us how they could donate money in appreciation of the newsletter. And we decided we wanted to make such donations possible. ☕
So, what’s the donation count two years later? No less than 17 people sent us 34 coffees for a total amount of €102 ($111). That might not seem like a lot, and it certainly doesn’t compensate for the hours we spend working on every newsletter, but each virtual coffee was deeply appreciated. Each donated coffee felt like proof that you value the stories we share about the ups and downs of our freelancing careers every two weeks. Publicly writing about our working lives is a sometimes tricky balancing act, and your donations made us feel that our candour and openness is appreciated. So, thank you, truly. 💜
Something we also noticed over time: we received more donations whenever we reminded people of our Ko-fi page. It seemed that most of you read over the link to our donation page at the top of each newsletter. But we received virtual coffees when we put our discomfort aside and simply asked you all to send a few euros our way. An ask that went something like this:
“Did this newsletter really resonate with you or did you draw useful advice from it? Then consider buying us a virtual coffee and help us to keep this newsletter going.”
So, if you’ve been considering setting up a donation page for a creative project of your own, our main piece of advice would be to display a big donation button on your website, and to regularly and explicitly invite your audience or followers to send some money your way.
We could of course use the €102 we’ve raised so far to actually by ourselves some lattes, but we preferred to use them to reach even more freelancers, and to continue to grow this fantastic, supportive community. So, we decided to use Canva, a free graphic design platform, to design a Friendly Freelancer promotional postcard. We had 250 cards printed and that’s how we used a first chunk of the money you’ve given us - we spent €35,49 on printing costs.
Over the next few weeks, we plan to leave a few of these cards at coworking spots and coffee bars (you know, the unofficial office of many a freelancer), in the hopes that we can reach more people with our newsletter. And you can help us with that if you live in Brussels. We’d love to hand-deliver a stack of cards to your coworking spot or favourite local coffee bar, get to know you, our readers, better and have a chat about freelancing (or anything you want, really) over a quick coffee.
What do you say? Pick a calendar slot that suits you here and we’ll come see you over the next four weeks.
And for those of you that live in Belgium but not Brussels, we’ve also put aside five stacks of postcards to send to Belgium-based readers. Just drop us an email at freelancerthefriendly@gmail.com The first five readers to do so will get a stack of postcards sent to them by snail mail. Once we’ve done that, we’ll have almost used up all our coffee donation money, but we hope to have helped a whole new bunch of freelancers discover The Friendly Freelancer. Because freelancing can get lonely. But it doesn’t have to be.
Do you live outside of Belgium? You can help us spread the word by telling other freelancers about us, and sharing the newsletter on social media.
Again, THANK YOU SO MUCH for all the coffees and the appreciative messages, personal anecdotes and words of wisdom so many of you send us after each newsletter. They mean the world to us. We have a fantastic Q&A lined up for you in two weeks and will take a month-long break after that. We’ll be back in August with more rants … ehm … stories about our freelancing dilemmas and victories.
Have a wonderful, restful summer,
Selma and Linda