When we launched this website a month ago we promised you total financial transparency, so here it is, writes Roshan Muhammed Salih.
We received around £450 in donations from our readers. We are very grateful for this money especially given the fact that we made no direct appeal for funds.
How did we spend that money?
Around £220 was spent on taking out a small advertisement on Facebook so that people would know about our site.
Around £40 was spent on the expenses we incurred travelling to various events to cover them.
And the remainder (around £190) we have banked to cover future necessary costs.
I must emphasize that no one who works on this site or who contributed to it took a salary or any money whatsoever out of it. We are yet to receive any money from advertising and we have no other source of income apart from donations.
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I want to make these statistics public because it annoys me how financially untransparent Muslim organizations are. Many of them take money from the public but are very vague about where that money goes.
So even though this website is dealing with very small amounts of cash we hope to set an example to others by publishing monthly accounts like this. Perhaps others will follow our lead. We should insist that they do.
How did we do?
Ok, so how did we do since our launch a month ago?
Well, we’ve had around 30,000 unique visitors to our site, around 41,500 overall visits and around 59,000 page views.
So we’re definitely not on our way to world domination yet but that ain’t bad for a small website with hardly any resources that is completely dependent on the goodwill and hard work of volunteers.
I guess the highlights of our first month would be the analysis we provided on the Woolwich murder; our exposure of plans by a Birmingham mosque to host a “Help for Heros” event; and two letters we received threatening us with legal action!
But joking aside, I think we have definitely filled a niche by covering the Muslim community as comprehensively, fairly, independently and professionally as we can given our limitations.
And I say that because I know people are reading our stuff, commenting on it and sharing it around.
Future ambitions
Moreover, we are really ambitious for this website. We want to keep it growing, to recruit more staff and contributors, and to eventually become the number one media reference for British Muslims. And in order to do that we need your money!
I reckon we need around £500 a month to keep the website going, to pay for advertising, technical maintenance and journalism costs. And we need around £1,000 a month to actually grow the site and deliver a much better service to you.
Personally I hate asking anyone for cash but if you believe in what we are doing and want to see it improve please donate as much as you can to this website by clicking on the donate button. Any amount would be appreciated but obviously the bigger the better.
Ramadan is around the corner and we will all be giving money to various great causes and I really believe that 5Pillarz is one of them. We are really doing our best to give the community a voice unpolluted by the mainstream; we are really trying hard to reflect what’s going on in the Muslim community in a fair and responsible way; and we are really striving to represent ordinary Muslims rather than just the powers-that-be. And I think that is worthy of the community’s support.
The small British Jewish community has supported its own media for over 100 years yet the large Muslim community doesn’t seem willing to fund its own. That is why many of our current media platforms are foreign-owned and influenced and are therefore subject to editorial and other restrictions.
I want to keep 5Pillarz completely independent but I can’t do it without your help. So please donate and don’t make me beg anymore!
Thank you!
@RMSalih
