*update*
We've reached our initial funding goal, and well as our $8000 goal. You've covered our startup costs, provided money for a website that will rock, and covered our butts incase of a lawsuit.
We want to keep the momentum going now. If this campaign has taught us anything so far, it's that running this project is a LOT of work. From this, we think it's important to raise money to pay for a staffer, as we all currently work full-time jobs.
Over $8000, every $1600 we raise will pay for one month of half-time work. $3200 will pay for one month of full-time work.
What is FactsCan?
An independent and nonpartisan fact-checking website on Canadian politics.
Most Canadians know to take politicians’ words with a grain of salt. Facts are blurred, statistics cherry-picked, promises broken, and fiction presented as fact. We all know this, but politicians still skirt the truth to win donors and voters.
This project is an attempt to counter that. FactsCan is run by a team of nonpartisan Canadians who care about political discussions in our country. We are creating a fact-checker: A website for fact-checking claims made by politicians and pundits leading up to the 2015 federal election. We’ll also give tips to help Canadians spot misleading statements themselves. We hope that by offering Canadians objective, transparent analysis of what politicians are saying, these politicians will be more careful with what they say.
Fact-checking websites have sprung up in different places around the world, and we think it’s time for Canada to have one. Your contributions will get FactsCan off the ground, helping improve the quality of political discussions in our country. There's a lot of good stuff to argue about without having to argue about facts.
What We Need & What You Get
We want FactsCan to start on the right foot. To do this, we need help with our startup costs. The biggest single item we need help with is the cost of having a website professionally designed and developed. FactsCan.ca will be the project’s home, and we want to be sure the website is an absolute pleasure to use. It needs to be stable, intuitive, and easy on the eyes. It also needs to attract our readers (you!) back.
For your contributions, we have a few different ‘perk’ levels (perks are the rewards you get for contributing to our campaign). The major differentiator between these perks is the amount of gratitude we'll have for you. We could have done something like offer t-shirts with our logo, but that would mean raising more money.
Ultimately, what we are offering is an information service that we hope is useful to all Canadians. We hope you'll come to FactsCan when you want objective analysis of the claims Canadian politicians are making. To give you a good sense of what you can expect once we're fully up and running, we'll be releasing fact-checks throughout this Indiegogo Campaign.
Detailed Costs:
Costs so far include:
$221 - Federal Incorporation
$250 - Provincial Incorporation
$224 - Domain and webhosting (one year)
We’ve paid out of pocket for these, but we need help with the costs of a professional website. For that, we need:
$2,800 - Site design and development
$500 - Site maintenance / ongoing development
Add in taxes, subtract fees from Indiegogo and payment processing, and we sit at just over $5,000.
How You can Help
There’s three major ways you can help FactsCan succeed:
1. Donate!
Every little bit helps.
2. Volunteer
This project needs all kinds of skills from all kinds of passionate people. Can you dig up the details on anything? Are you hypercritical and able to spot logical errors with your eyes closed? Are you great with social media? Have you successfully managed online communities? If so, or if there are other ways you could contribute, holler at us on here or on our Facebook page.
3. Get the Word Out
Like us, follow us, mention us, share us, and help us get the word out. Ultimately, this project succeeds when Canadians use it, and the best way we can get the message out is through you!
Risks & Challenges
We’re confident that we can do a good job with this project. The co-founders bring experience in journalism, analytics, and public policy, and we have great people supporting the project in various capacities. We know that even if all else failed, we’d be able to get a decent job done in our spare time while working our regular jobs.
We’d rather go big though.
This campaign is one way of trying to maximize the impact of FactsCan. This campaign isn't only to help us raise the funds we need, but also to get the word out to everyone we can.
Another challenge we’ll have is one of credibility. People will wonder how they can trust what we write, if we know what we’re talking about, or if we have some hidden agenda. We’ve thought about how we can earn your trust, and came up with three principles to that end: objectivity, transparency, and accessibility.
These principles will mean several things. For objectivity, our writing will be descriptive, not prescriptive. We will describe how things are, or may be, but will never say or imply how things ought to be.
Transparency means clearly laying out our analyses, the assumptions and sources they contain, and the processes by which we reach our conclusions. It also means being open about ourselves and the work we are doing; where our topics are coming from; and our balance of coverage.
Finally, we will be accessible in two ways. The first is by providing learning sections so that people can do similar analyses for themselves, even applying these tools to evaluate our work. The second will be by encouraging community involvement with the project through topic suggestions, and comment sections where people can critique what we’ve posted. These comments will be taken to heart, and if appropriate, modify our content.
