First Steps to a Sustainable Blipfoto

Hi everyone.

We won’t keep you in suspense any longer. Thanks to all those who have paid for memberships in the last few weeks we are now able to say with confidence that (barring unforeseen disaster) Blipfoto will still be here in a year’s time!

We’re delighted so many of you are supporting Blipfoto in this way, and this is a huge step forward in making the site sustainable in the long term.  It’s a huge achievement, and we think it’s something for the whole community to be really proud of.

A few of you have asked for facts and figures about the membership take-up. For now, we can say that sales of memberships are in line with our expectations and plans, and there is enough money to cover the day to day running costs of the site for the next year: servers, bandwidth, storage and the other company expenses.  As directors we are continuing to work on an unpaid voluntary basis. 

For those that are interested, we’ll be releasing an annual report in the New Year with more information on the first year of community ownership.

Please remember that Blipfoto’s main income is from selling memberships – if you’ve not bought yours we encourage you to do so – you can still buy at any time.  The more people that join us the brighter the future is for Blipfoto -  we would love to get to a point where we have enough money for further development and enhancements to the site.

We want to emphasise the importance of the site being an inclusive, friendly community.  It is paramount.  It’s one of the main reasons we created a community interest company as the means of buying and running the site.  It’s what makes Blipfoto the unique, friendly and varied community it is, and is the reason we explicitly chose to keep a free member option.  If you don’t feel able to purchase a membership that’s absolutely fine – just please excuse our on-going fundraising and understand why we will continue to do it.

Right – we feel like we can start to relax a bit now. Thank you so much, and let’s get back to some quiet, normal blipping and forget all this financial talk for a bit.

Thank you.