Saving Evolver

The Last couple days I’ve been on the Gaia social network outreaching to people about Evolver. It’s an interesting thing to witness, especially knowing the financial situation with Evolver. Basically what has happened with Gaia is the creator can no longer continue the site because she can’t afford to. There are a lot of things in threads on Gaia that remind me of Evolver. To think that this could happen to Evolver bothers me, I love this place and I don’t want this to happen to it. Here is a quote from the woman that ran Gaia.
"Also, we did try a number of business models over the years–from the Pro tools to a wholly ad-supported site to a paid subscription version to affiliate blasts and partnerships–and only rarely came close to covering the cost of hosting alone, not to mention developer and support salaries. Anyone interested in taking over should know that the amount of additional money necessary to keep the site up each month is not insignificant. (Thanks to the business support we've had here, it's far, far smaller than it was in the Zaadz days, when we were running of investor capital, but it's still substantial and doing something like 'donating' the site to a nonprofit would result in it being more of a burden or cost on that entity than a benefit.)"
That comment from her touches base on a number of things the Evoler community has talked about, almost eerily so. In another comment she responded to the prospect of charging a fee for the use of the website.
"As a background, we launched a monthly subscription option when the site first became Gaia–an ad-free version that came with an @gaia.com email address, but only a few hundred signed up; it barely made a dent in the hosting fees and ended up costing as much to run the program as it did brought in."
Luckily Evolver is a slightly different situation, we have a team of people working 50 or 60 hour weeks on the tech support and creating the site. I don’t know this for sure, but I think a lot of tech support for Gaia was out-sourced. However the Evolver Social Movement membership does need to produce enough revenue for the staff to pay their bills. Our Evolver staff is not asking to be wealthy they are asking to pay their bills.
There is however some hope to be found in the Gaia community. In response to a comment that I posted about the Evolver community I received this-
"There are other websites out there, and i'm glad to hear about www.evolver.net. It is funny though. I never seem to learn this lesson enough: you trulky never know what you have until you're faced with losing it. This site has done so much for me, and I've done little for it. Have you all seen these postings about how if we all gave $1 a month we could save this site? I don't really think thats all we'd need to do…but wouldn't that be nice? I'd love to think that desire + energy equal strength and then that becomes power…and we can keep this 'place' going, all joined together. I'm out here, with my hope…+ more + more+ more. I'd like to think, anythings possible."
It’s very interesting to be witnessing this happening to a community that so many people so dearly care about, when I am face with the possibility of the same thing happening to a community that I so dearly care about. I can’t help but to picture the blogs and threads that would be on Evolver if it were to shut down, I imagine it would be very similar. I don’t want this to happen, I know that no one else that is a part of this amazing Evolver community wants this to happen as well. So what do we do? We can learn from Gaia user’s mistakes. We can get past our personal biased about having such a problem with membership and the supposed “elitism” that comes with it. I have faith in Evolvers, I don’t think we will feel like we are better than the non-paying users. I think we can realize that this membership is a method of survival. It’s also a way that we can help what we love stay in existence.
It isn’t going to just take a handful of people to save Evolver, it’s going to take all of us. Please don’t let Evolver fail, I’m going to do everything I can to make sure it doesn’t from my stand point. And I’m sure that the whole Evolver HQ is going to do everything it can do to make sure that this doesn’t happen to us. Is it too much to ask that us Evolver’s do everything we can to make sure this doesn’t happen to us? I don’t think it is, and I have faith in Evolver’s. If every single one of us paid a dollar a month it would save us, but it has to be everyone, not just a few hundred.