In Common was set up to celebrate and enhance community and culture in and around Southampton and provide a platform for people whose voices often go unheard in more mainstream platforms.
It was founded around two and a half years ago, with the help of generous donations, which helped cover the cost of website development and hosting, and since then has been run entirely on a voluntary basis, with local people giving their time to write, edit, and take photos for the site all for free.
Around a year ago we launched our Patreon fundraiser, inviting people to make a monthly donation of as little as a pound to help make In Common sustainable.
We have had some very generous donors and are grateful that the running costs of the site are now being met. However, producing a website like this, with a range of stories from event and show previews to longer feature pieces takes time, quite a bit of time, actually. And we would really like to be able to pay our editors and regular contributors an hourly rate of the living wage for their/our work.
we are open to advertising from ethical businesses, and please do get in contact if you are interested in reaching our loyal readership base, but currently all our income comes from our generous donors.
We would like to expand what the site covers, to better represent and advocate for the city and its people but we are limited without being able to pay ourselves anything for our time. No one likes asking for money, at least we don’t, but while some of our team enjoy contributing to In Common as a hobby, for others it takes up the time of a job, without helping to pay the bills.
We would love to do more, to explore areas of city life that deserve sharing with a wider audience, to help counter injustices, to amplify voices that have something to say and just need a platform to speak from, to translate every request for press coverage into a story on our site.
For this reason, we are setting the fundraising target of an income of £500 a month from donations and advertising.
We currently generate just over £100 a month, entirely through donations, so it’s a tall order but one that we hope we can fulfil, with the help of our regular readers. Just giving £1 a month would help us reach our target and be able to pay the living wage to our hardworking team. In Common doesn’t have any shareholders and no one involved will make money from anyone else’s labour.
The donation link is here: https://www.patreon.com/incommonsoton or you can help save us platform fees by donating directly if you prefer (please email for details).
We really love creating and sharing In Common, and we hope you love it too. If you can afford to donate the cost of buying us a collective cup of tea once a month, it would mean a lot to us, and hopefully, you’d be more than paid back in more and more varied content.
Whether or not you can afford to donate, please do follow us on Facebook and Twitter and have a chat with us on there, share our stories, tell your friends about us, and be part of our community too. And if you feel inspired to be part of our team, either with a one off story or as a regular contributor, we would love to hear from you.
If you are interested in advertising in In Common or want to get in touch about anything else, please email editor@in-common.co.uk