We live in interesting times. The second Scottish independence referendum might happen a lot sooner than we were all expecting - with the UK government rushing through an in-out vote on the European Union in June, the Yes movement in Scotland could find itself having to mobilise for an emergency second indyref within months if it looks like the country will be dragged out of Europe against its wishes by the rest of the UK.
So we need to be ready.
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You probably know what we do by now, so we won't ramble on. Thanks to your support, in the past year
Wings Over Scotland has gone from strength to strength. In 2015 we recorded our highest-ever readership figures - an average of
290,522 unique visitors every month (an increase of almost 51,000 on the previous year), reading just short of
59 million pages in 12 months (more than 5m up on 2014).
This left some Unionists rather disappointed.
Wings is now
the second-most-read politics blog in the entire UK, let alone in Scotland. We get
97% as many pageviews as the Spectator website, with just a microscopic fraction of their resources. And that makes us by far the loudest and strongest media voice of the entire Yes movement, including newspapers. (We get several times more traffic than all the other major pro-indy websites put together.)
We're not backed by billionaire businessmen or wealthy celebrity donors, and we don't have advertisers telling us what we can print or who we can hire - all our funding comes directly from you, our amazing readers.
Unionists really hate that.
So our plan, in short, is to keep doing it.
For the second time in a row we're asking for a bit less money as the core target this year, because frankly we've still got some left over from last year's fundraiser, which thanks to your generosity far exceeded its goal.
But that's only to cover the basics - a modest editor's salary* and payment for contributors, the cost of web-hosting (which we upgraded yet again last year to cope with our ever-growing traffic) and necessary equipment, plus Indiegogo's commission for hosting this appeal.
Everything over and above the basic target will be added to the Wings Fighting Fund alongside last year's surplus. Exactly what the fighting fund will be spent on depends on circumstances - it's very likely to include commissioning more of our regular
opinion polls and possibly hiring permanent staff to increase the amount of content - but if it should indeed be the case that a second indyref comes along, this time we want to print
one million copies of the Wee Blue Book (in an updated and revised edition), to follow the 300,000 we distributed across Scotland in 2014.
We want to do that because it's the only reliable way we can get the information that matters to the people of Scotland. We already know we can't rely on the mainstream media for fair and honest coverage, so we have to do it ourselves.
Because this time we really have to win.
* £22,958 - equivalent to 50 hours a week at the mean Living Wage recommended by the Living Wage Foundation. This is a real-terms increase, as requested by readers, of around £1,500 on last year.
