December giving drive update

MARY REICHARD, HOST: It’s Tuesday, December 31st, the last day of 2019. We’re so glad you’ve turned to The World and Everything in It to start the day. Good morning, I’m Mary Reichard.

NICK EICHER, HOST: And I’m Nick Eicher. Well, today is the final day of our December Giving Drive, and I just want to say thanks so much for the overwhelming response. We are very encouraged.

Now, we’ve made a late change and I want to tell you about that. But first, as background, when we set the goal initially, we had three things in mind, our ABCs for this giving drive: (a) for achievable, what seems reasonable, (b) for budget, which is to say, what’s necessary to meet budget, pay the current costs, live to fight another day, and then (c) for challenge, what would be the bold thing to do, what would require some faith on our part, a challenging goal that if we hit it, that would give us a nice boost of confidence, another “c” word, that we can grow this effort.

So, I had a call yesterday with our team and what we learned as of yesterday morning was that given where we stood, we were going to make the goal and then some. 

It seemed we’d put too much emphasis on “a” and “b”—what’s achievable and meets budget—and not enough emphasis on “c” for challenge.

REICHARD: I think it’s fair to say that you’ve challenged us, to think bigger, to imagine more. 

Because of your generosity, as we’ve said, we’re launching the Effective Compassion podcast. We do have confidence now also to take the next steps toward the Legal Docket podcast. Believe me when I say that’ll take more brains to research, write and produce, obviously, but also to bring Biblical worldview to all of it. To put the resources into taking the time actually to think it through all the way. 

Dare we think what else can we do?

EICHER: That’s what your amazing response to our giving drive has done: dared us to be bolder. So we added another hundred-thousand dollars to what we can reasonably say is our new challenge goal for the December Giving Drive. 

What would one of these be without a little drama! 

But seriously, this is two-fold. We do want to be bold, but we also don’t want to give anyone the idea that we can’t put your gift to work doing more and better journalism.

Here’s what I mean by that:

I get the pleasure of meeting and talking to donors and reading the wonderful notes many people enclose with checks, and it’s humbling. But here’s the message that comes through consistently: Just Do More. 

The Nike slogan is Just Do It. What our WORLD Movers say is, “Just Do More.” And that’s what it means to stretch and be challenged and give more people the opportunity to be an important part of this army.

So all that to say, we’re sitting at 90 percent and have about $100,000 to go to hit the new challenge goal. You can follow all the action online at wng.org, watch the progress bar progress.

REICHARD: Wng.org/donate. We have all day today and through tonight!

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