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It's Giving Tuesday! Support Your Local 70,000 Member Slack Instance

Today is Giving Tuesday, if you don’t know what that is let me just copy/paste from Wikipedia:

It is touted as a “global generosity movement unleashing the power of people and organizations to transform their communities and the world”.

Essentially, it’s a coordinated effort to have people and orgs donate money or services or whatever to their community orgs. It always happens 5 days after Thanksgiving. It’s a great way to help support small orgs and community orgs instead of large companies.

Why am I talking about Giving Tuesday here?

I’m not going to bury the lede: Help support the Mac Admins Foundation by visiting macadmins.org/join and picking a donation tier. But continue reading if you need to know more!

Back in February, I joined the board of the Mac Admins Foundation, a 501(c)(3) charitable organization with the goal to advance the global community of people who manage Apple devices at large and small scales by providing them with the tools and training they need to grow and thrive. This is something I am super happy to have the opportunity to do and I really happy to be giving back to the community that has given me so much and helped advance my career.

So, I’m writing about Giving Tuesday because we’re running our first ever Membership/Donor drive from November 27th to December 6th. We’re reaching out to our vast user base and asking you to open your wallets to help your community.

Membership? Like…I have to pay for the Mac Admins Slack now?!

No! Just going to make that 100% clear to everyone, and in case you missed it:

Membership to Slack is not contingent upon joining/making donations.

This means that you do not need to donate to use the Mac Admins Slack. The Foundation will do everything in their power to ensure that the Slack (or whatever future platform may arise) will remain open in perpetuity.

We’re using the term membership here to simplify things. You’re making a recurring donation and will get something out of it. Think of it like a Patreon or an NPR/PBS style drive; you can donate any time but during our drives you get rewarded!

Phew, okay. So what’s the donation go toward?

I’ll just keep this simple; the Mac Admins Slack instance has over 11,000 active weekly users. Running a resource of this scale has costs, high costs! Each active user on Slack costs the Foundation roughly $1 per month right now, that cost will most likely be going up next year. We’re also hoping to expand our scholarship program, mentorship program, and offer training and certification support again.

To make it even simpler: Here’s how your contributions will help

  • Sustaining the Mac Admins Slack: Covering operational costs to keep this incredible resource free and accessible for everyone.  
  • Funding Scholarships: This year, we proudly funded scholarships to send six community members to MacAD.UK and Penn State Mac Admins Conference, among others. Your donations will enable us to provide even more opportunities like this in the future.

We set a goal of 100 recurring donors during the drive and we’re so close right now! Even if we hit 100, I want to see our community crush that goal.

Okay, how do I join?

If I have convinced you to join, it’s quite simple. Head to macadmins.org/join and pick a tier to sign up. I suggest making an account so you can manage your donation. There are options for monthly and annual giving, so whatever works for you.

If you’re looking for the best way to support the community, this is it!

Thanks for reading, please share this post or any links to the Mac Admins Foundation drive.

❤️

This post is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0 by the author.