Just over a year ago now, the readers of Wings Over Scotland quietly revolutionised the independence campaign. When we launched the first ever formal public fundraising appeal for a Scottish political website (indeed, as far as we know the first for a politics site anywhere in Britain), your response was incredible.

Our £30,000 target was smashed, enabling the site to become a full-time professional concern, and others followed in our footsteps. By our reckoning around £150,000 was raised in 2013 for various pro-independence sites and projects, including the Common Weal and "Scotland Yet", a full-length documentary currently being produced by Jack Foster and Christopher Silver, makers of "The Fear Factor".

Now it's time to finish the job.

We pledged last year that in return for your money and your trust we'd devote ourselves to the site, give you more articles and bring the facts and arguments about independence to a wider audience. We like to think we've delivered.

MONTHLY READERSHIP

Jan 2013: 29,769
Feb 2014: 233,296

MONTHLY PAGEVIEWS

Jan 2013: 755,406
Feb 2014: 3,647,300

POSTS PUBLISHED

Year to Feb 2013: 632
Year to Feb 2014: 1,211

In the last 12 months Wings Over Scotland has been visited by 959,086 unique readers - almost a quarter of the entire Scottish electorate. And as our properly-researched, fully-sourced information and arguments have reached more and more of the people of Scotland, so the gap in the opinion polls has closed.

(Not that we're taking all the credit for that, of course, but a recent poll for STV found that this website is the single most-relied-on named source for independence facts in Scotland, so it seems fair to say we've done our bit.)

It would seem a shame to stop now. But we've spent all of last year's money, so it's time for us to ask you to put your hands in your pockets again.

This year's target is an ambitious £50,000. That's a lot of cash, but then there's a lot to do. Here's what we want it for:

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1. SALARY

Keen readers will have noticed that as editor I usually put in around 16 hours a day, seven days a week, 52 weeks a year - from reading and tweeting interesting stories from the papers around 6-7am to throwing things at the TV screen during Newsnight Scotland at 11pm.

But I do pop out to the shops sometimes and I don't want to play the martyr, so let's only call half of that work time - that's 50 hours a week. The UK living wage is £7.65 an hour, which comes to £19,890 a year. It's not a fortune (it's nearly £7000 less than the UK average) but it'll keep the lights on at Wings HQ.

(Why a full year with only seven months to the referendum? Because we're not hypothesising on defeat - if and when we win the subsequent negotiations will be every bit as important as the campaign, so we plan to be watching the politicians and media just as closely as we do now.)

2. RUNNING COSTS

We've been a victim of our own success - our webhosting costs, for example, recently jumped by over 600% to cope with our rocketing traffic figures.

We're just finalising the move across to a new seriously-upgraded server which should cope better, and also reduce the security measures we've had to adopt to cope with a malicious and ongoing attack aimed at taking the site down. We're budgeting £3000 for hosting and other expenses.

3. PROJECT BLUE

The thing we want to do more than anything else this year is The Wee Blue Book. This will be a printed pocket-sized booklet, 32 or 48 pages in total, containing the most concise and accessible summaries of all the key issues about independence that we can muster, dealing with all of the No campaign's scare stories and putting the facts right at people's fingertips, ready to refer to wherever you may be.

We think printed material is vital, because you can only reach so many people on the internet. It won't be cheap. We'll write the words, but we'll need a professional to design it and lay it out and then we'll have to print thousands of copies and distribute them across Scotland. We tentatively reckon £15,000 will do it.

4. MORE POLLS

Our Panelbase opinion polls - crowdfunded separately last year - have played a significant part in the debate, generating significant amounts of media coverage and bringing many new readers to the site. We've got a little bit of money still left in the polling fund, but we'd like to top it up and do at least two more between now and September. That'll take around £8000.

5. A LITTLE HELP

We've carried posts by around 50 different authors. Many contribute regularly, like Scott Minto's invaluable in-depth features and Chris Cairns' brilliant weekly cartoons. These take hours or even days of work, and people deserve to be paid.

We also haven't had a day off in the last 18 months, and it'd be nice to be able to commission a few pieces to cover a weekend break once in a blue moon. Can we find a modest £4000 for all of those things?

6. THE MIDDLE MAN

Indiegogo make running a fundraiser like this easy and straightforward both for us and people who want to donate. Very reasonably they take a small cut for that service, which means that to actually get £50,000 we have to take in another £3000 on top.

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And just like that, there's £53,000. Ooft. It's a lot of money - more than anyone has asked for or achieved before - but we think that the breakdown above is offering pretty good value for it, and we hope you'll agree.

Should we be lucky enough to exceed it, we've got a whole raft of what in the fundraising business are called "stretch goals" - other projects we'd like to do:

- We'd like to produce more printed materials, perhaps including a paper edition of The Sealand Gazette.

- We really want to do some live events, such as Q&A sessions for undecided voters in locations around Scotland. Those will cost money to hire venues and equipment, produce flyers for and so on.

- Undertaking some promotional work - readers have suggested hiring billboards in railway stations to bring more people to the site, for example. They're not as expensive as you might think.

But let's not get ahead of ourselves - we can worry about those if we get past the initial goal, and that's a big enough ask to be going on with for now.

There are a lot of you out there, but times are hard and not everyone can spare money. If you can't, don't fret about it, and definitely don't send us anything you can't really afford - there are plenty of other ways you can help out, by tweeting and sharing links and telling people about the site. We'd be nothing without all the people who've spread the word in the last 12 months.

But if you've got a couple of quid burning a hole in your pocket, and a desire for independence burning in your heart, we reckon you could do worse than send a wee something our way. We'll make good use of it, we promise.