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UPDATE: We ended the day having raised $70,530 in donations!

While I'm waiting for the Fund-o-Meter to refresh with the final totals for Donation Day, I just want to say that we may not have reached our goal of raising $100,000 in 24 hours, but we did raise over $70,000 today! Incredible. This will do a huge amount of good for both NaNoWriMo and the Young Writers Program, as we work to pay this year's bills and set aside money for 2010.

Thanks so much to all our awesome donors who made Donation Day such a success, and to all our MLs who helped get the word out about it (and donated themselves!). We love you more than you know.

Chris

We just have a half hour left in Donation Day! Our dream of reaching $519,600 and singing and dancing for you looks like it may not quite happen this year, but we only need to raise another $11,340 to cross the $500,000 mark on the Fund-o-meter, which would mean we raised over $80,000 in donations in a single day—an enormous, unprecedented accomplishment for us, and fantastic news for our programs.

Please chip in, if you haven't yet! And thanks to everyone who has supported NaNoWriMo and the Young Writers Program on Donation Day! We love you more than you know.

Chris

Okay! We're moving these updates to the half hour, because that's when the Fund-o-Meter refreshes. So that last drive was great. We raised $8,565 in less than two hours, mostly through incredibly kind folks chipping in $10 or $25. Every dollar helps immensely, and it makes me feel incredibly warm and fuzzy to see our donor rates rise from 6% to 6.22%. Given the size of the event this year, that's a big leap!

Super-thanks to our top donors during that drive, including LeAnn, Sandra, Karen, Anita, Paul, Julia, Michael, Heather, Becki, Allegra, and Christopher, and an extra-special thanks to Anne, who will be naming a character in my 2009 NaNoWriMo novel (start thinking of some good names, Anne!).

So we're now standing at $486,760. Before midnight, Pacific, time (in an hour and fifteen minutes), our goal is to get to $519,600. It's a tall order, but do you think we can get to $500,000 on the FOM by 11:30?

Yep. I think we can.

Thanks, everyone, for funding the things you believe in! It's so easy to take the institutions you love for granted. It's a lot harder to remember to step up and support things that make your world a more interesting place to be. You rock!

Chris

We raised $8,070 in that last hour, which is incredible. Thank you, donors! I want to extend an extra huge thanks to Emily, Ian, Joanna, Susan, and Margaret for going above and beyond. Those halos look wonderful on all of you.

We’re at $58,595 now. Our next big goal is reaching $75K by 10 PM, Pacific. We’ll then have two hours to raise $25,000, which will be a cakewalk. And then I can begin composing "That Beautiful Tuesday" and Lindsey will start practicing her improvisational dance steps.

Given the amount of time we have left in our drive and the funds we still want to raise, I’m going old school. For anyone who donates $500 or more before 10 PM, Pacific, I’ll name a character in my 2009 NaNoWriMo novel after you (or a friend of yours).

It’s your chance to be immortalized in a reasonably unhorrible novel! You’ll love it!

Thanks so much for your support, folks! We've moved the participant donation rate above 6%. Can we see 6.5% by 10 pm? The Donation Station awaits!

Chris

Okay, folks! I'm taking over from Lindsey on the Donation Day loving and taskmastering and will be rocking it with you from here to midnight. As of a few minutes ago, we crossed a huge milestone! We started the morning at $419,600. We're now at $470,125. My math sense says that means we've raised....$50,525! Today!

Donors, you rock. Thank you. We're going to make it to $100K today! Our goal for 8 pm, Pacific: Getting to $60,000.

It's a huge leap, but we can do it if just a few hundred more folks pick up a halo in our Donation Station right now. Get that angelic glow! Bathe in the great karma that comes from helping keep NaNoWriMo and YWP going!

In other news, we're screening the brand-new Week Four Tips NaNovideo one homepage block over!

Chris
NaNoWriMo

Good news! Winning is activated and the correct winner page is displaying! We already have 387 winners, and many more validating all the time. To see who these authors are, go to Author Search --> Advanced Search Options and select the box next to Search Only Winners. Congratulations to everyone who has already crossed the finish line!

And for those who aren't quite there, we have time! I am right there with you. (I am trying to pound out about 3,500 words a night!) We can do it!

If you haven't been following our tremendous Donation Day progress, we're still climbing our way toward $100,000. Every little bit helps!

We love our Wrimos!
Lindsey

Hear ye! Hear ye! To pay the bills for this year's NaNoWriMo and Young Writers Program, and hopefully set aside enough money to do it all again next year, we're throwing a Donation Day party today! Our goal: raising $100,000 in the next 24 hours through our hyper-secure, very handsome Donation Station.

So far, 4.7% of our participants have donated! We love you! To the other 95.3%: We love you, too, and ask that you take a quick minute to think about what NaNoWriMo has been worth to you. If you've gotten something out of the event, please give something back.

Your donation will help us pay for free creative writing programs that bring joy, inspiration, and terrifying deadlines to over 200,000 kids, teens, and adults around the world.

We will also sing and dance for you in a most embarrassing fashion.

Our total amount raised so far in 2009 is $419,600. So our goal is to get to $519,600 by 11:59 PM, Pacific, tonight.

Will you help us get there by picking up a halo right now?

Thank you! Thank you! Thank you!

Chris

First off—to everyone who ramped their word counts north of 30,000 this weekend, I congratulate you. Our word count bumps were instrumental in pushing us past last year's record-setting collective word count by a huge margin. Two billion words this year? Yes, please.

We're in the home stretch now. The 30,000s are so much better than the 20,000s its not even funny.

We held the third-annual Night of Writing Dangerously last night, and it almost made me cry it was so great. Two hundred folks from Australia, Canada, and throughout the US gathered together in San Francisco's most beautiful ballroom, united in the common cause of stuffing ourselves silly, winning prizes, and writing our pants off.

In addition to all that pantsless noveling, we raised over $30,000 for NaNoWriMo and the Young Writers Program. Final word-count totals for the group for the night are still to come, but Sarah's early tabulations has us over 500,000 words for the evening. Which is eerie, as that's the number of donuts we consumed as well. We'll be putting up a blog post today with a photo round-up. (If you were there and took photos, please add them to the NaNoWriMo Flickr pool!)

The Week Four pep talk email will be going out late tomorrow, which is also the day of our incredible, life-changing, history-making attempt at raising $100,000 in donations in a single day. If we do it, we've promised to embarrass ourselves publicly on an epic scale. (Lindsey is already practicing her interpretive dance moves here in the office.)

The drive starts at midnight, Pacific tonight!

Happy Week Four, everyone!

Chris

Good luck on this penultimate weekend of NaNoWriMo. It's going to be a huge two days! By Sunday, I think we'll end up surpassing our collective 1.6 billion word count from last year's NaNoWriMo.

And speaking of Sunday...By bedtime on that day we should all be at—and this number just made me cry a little when I saw it—36,674 words.

Let me double-check that.

Yep. Shoot.

If there's anyone else riding the slow train like me, can we at least make a pact to be at 30,000 by Sunday night? We can surge ahead in the final week, and when we cross the finish line and dump Gatorade all over ourselves it will be all the sweeter because we were so far behind going into Week Four.

This Sunday is also the Night of Writing Dangerously in San Francisco! The OLL office currently looks like a candy bomb went off, as Julia, Elaine, and Carolyn load up goodie bags with books and gadgets, carefully pack raffle prizes in baskets, and test the pyrotechnic display we'll be setting off every time someone crosses over 50K at the event.

If you're going to be there, we can't wait to hug you. If you're not, we'll miss you, and we'll post photos of the event on the site on Monday.

Have a great, productive weekend, everyone!

Chris

You may have noticed the Fund-o-Meter has been getting very colorful lately. We've seen a heartening surge in donations from participants, and we've continued to add our non-donor income to the totals, including all the money from merch sales.

Our goal before December 1 is to fill up all the books in the Fund-o-Meter, pay for both NaNo and YWP, and raise enough money to spend 2010 working on all the improvements laid out in those books, including developing a year-round version of NaNoWriMo.

To make sure we get there, we're going to host an all-day online fundraising drive on Tuesday the 24th. For it, we've set ourselves the crazy goal of raising $100,000 in donations in 24 hours. The most we've ever raised in a single day is $30,000, so this is a little loony.

But we have faith. We also have a very special offer.

If NaNoWriMo and the Young Writers Program can raise $100,000 in donations through our online Donation Station on Tuesday the 24th, I will write a song about the fundraising drive—tentatively entitled "That Beautiful Tuesday"—and perform it on NaNoVideo with staff musical accompaniment and Lindsey doing an interpretive dance alongside us.

This video will be a keepsake that NaNoWriMo participants of all ages can treasure and wince at for decades to come. Better still, your donations will mean we can bring back NaNoWriMo and the YWP for another great year of inspiration and encouragement in 2010.

The drive commences at 12:01 AM Pacific on Tuesday the 24th and runs till 11:59 PM Pacific that night. Thanks for helping us in our wordy mission!

Chris