We’ve come a long way from a technology perspective here at FindJodi.com. When we first launched our website in September of 2003, it was a ghost town. No one knew it existed. Slowly, over time, more and more people have discovered the site and we’ve grown to serve thousands of visitors per month. Most are anxious to find and/or learn about a resolution to Jodi’s case. We can assure you, we keep doing the best we can to find the end of the road.
But the road so far has been a bumpy one, especially from that same technology perspective. With no adequate funding, FindJodi.com, Inc. has relied on donations from you, the reader. Unfortunately those donations have dropped off in the past year. To prove my point, I’ve attached a screen-grab of our PayPal donations in the last four months: $25.00. That’s it. Total. We appreciate all of our donors. However, $25.00 won’t even get Gary from Spring Valley to Mason City for a follow up on a lead. This is perhaps the the fewest donations we’ve received in this amount of time in the last decade.
Donations to FindJodi.com, Inc. are at an all time low.
Our team is able to ‘get by’ with no funding. But we’re starting to look into ways of fundraising so we can ramp up our efforts and cover some expenses.
Help keep FindJodi.com online
How can you help?
- $1.00 – Anything helps!
- $10.00 – Court records requests
- $25.00 – 1/2 month of hosting
- $50.00 – FULL month of hosting
- $75.00 – Gas Money (Spring Valley to Mason city and back a few times )
- $100.00 – Significant expenses covered in a lead (travel, phone, printing, shipping)
- $300.00 – Hosting for a 1/2 year
- $600.00 – Hosting for a FULL year
- $1000.00 – Get the team together for annual meeting (in person from 4 states)
Server: the biggest expense
The biggest expense we will now incur is our hosting fee. Prior to this week, you may have noticed several outages and interruptions to service. That is because every time Jodi’s case was spotlighted on national TV, this website is FLOODED with traffic. It’s been enough traffic to overload and crash the server. This was happening far too often, that we decided to move the website to it’s own server away from the affordable server we were using. Hosting fees now will equate to $50/month. We’re hoping the site can better sustain the spikes in traffic. Time will tell. I have gone through and applied a number of different caching techniques so pages can load faster and prevent these crashes. But again, TMZ and Mashable don’t stay online because they have a perfectly optimized website on a cheap hosting server. They have the bucks to cover it.
So until we come across a nice windfall of cash to beef up our server to handle these spikes (positive thinking!), we turn to you – our faithful readers, to help us continue the mission with your financial support. Please help us continue the mission and free up some expense so we don’t limit our opportunities to track down leads more than they already are.
Fundraising ideas?
We also are turning to you for fundraising ideas. Know someone who has written grants? Have some local businesses interested in supporting Jodi’s case? Should we get a crowdfunding campaign going? We’re looking for some solid ideas to help boost the coffers so we can continue. We’d like to assemble some volunteers to help in the day-to-day fundraising efforts. Those efforts will be chronicled online.Our team has worked tirelessly over the years and paid for 95% of the expenses to track down clues. We need some help.
We hate asking for anything. And we know how busy everyone’s lives are. So if you can’t donate we fully understand. But we do appreciate you taking the time to stop by and check in on the site and our progress and read the forum and postings from other visitors.
We firmly believe the case will be solved – and you, the reader, will be an integral part of that equation.
Thanks for you support.
The FindJodi.com, Inc. Team
Image: Wikipedia
