A very special announcement

By: Matt Frazier

An inspirational quote from The Office‘s Michael Scott:

When I retire, I don’t want to just move to some island somewhere. I want to be the guy who gives it all back. I want it to be like:

‘Hey… who donated that hospital wing that’s saving so many lives?’

‘I don’t know. It was anonymous.’

‘Well, guess what. It was Michael Scott.’

‘But how do you know? It was anonymous.’

‘Because I’m him.’

Every year when I set goals at New Year’s, I always include a goal of giving to a charity whose cause I sympathize with.  And almost every year, it doesn’t happen.  I get caught up in other stuff, that goal takes a backseat, and by the end of the year I find myself in no position to make the donation I had hoped to make.

This year, it will be different.

I set the goal of giving 1000 dollars this year to help animals, and to make sure it happens, I’ve decided to give all advertising revenue that I earn from this blog’s pageviews in 2010 to [UPDATE: I had to delete the name after they asked me to, saying it was a legal issue and would require too much paperwork to comply with the laws].  That means that every time you load a page on No Meat Athlete, you will have helped protect animals just a little bit.

At this blog’s current readership levels, 1000 dollars is about what it earns from ad revenue in a year.  If the amount falls short at the end of the year, I’ll make up the difference.  On the other hand, if the amount exceeds 1000 dollars, which I fully expect it to as the blog continues to grow, I will donate that entire amount.  So there’s potential for it to go way beyond 1000 dollars!

I realize that there’s a difference between public giving (i.e. announcing it on your blog) and private giving, the latter being the more clearly altruistic and noble of the two.  But this isn’t about being the best person I can, it’s about donating as much as possible this year to help make sure animals are treated the way they deserve to be.  And by making it known that this blog’s pageviews help that cause, I believe I will generate more such pageviews than if I kept it a secret.  Ergo, more more money to help animals.  Making it public also makes it impossible for me to procrastinate on the goal since I’ll have hundreds of readers to hold me accountable.  (Telling other people about any type of goal, by the way, is a great way to make sure you keep it.)

So that’s the plan, and I can’t tell you how great I feel about it.  Putting my donation resolution first is something I should have done all along, rather than waiting until I was in a financial position to do so (which, as a grad student, I won’t be for a while!).  But I can imagine it’s very easy to rationalize, no matter your financial situation, waiting until you are just a little better off before start giving.  And then it never happens.

In the next few days, I’ll try to find some way of keeping track, on the site, of how much we have raised, so that you can see the good that your reading No Meat Athlete is doing.  And I’ll make sure I find a good way to prove to you that the money is not being deposited in the jar marked “Matt’s post-run beer fund.”

Please let me know if you have any thoughts or ideas to make this even better.  And thank you for reading my blog and making this possible.  Any other bloggers want to join me?