Dear friends! Today is Tuesday, which means, you get our weekly crowdfunding update: As of this week, we have collected 57% of the minimum monthly operating funds needed. THANK you, 1667 sponsors, who are willing to support Human Connection with your monthly donation! Our thanks also go to the many one-time donors.

People keep asking us why we need 30,000 Euros a month to run Human Connection. Well, running a social network is costly (just ask Mark Zuckerberg!) and building one from scratch – without advertising dollars – is even more challenging. For those who might think we’re out to enrich ourselves with the funds received, we want to share with you a list of what we’ll use the donated money for. Your tax-deductible donations go towards:

  • NOT the founder & managing director Dennis Hack – he does not get any money for his work at Human Connection.

We finance:

  • the programmers
  • administration and servers
  • the software
  • the technical editor
  • the small marketing team (in German and English)
  • the employee supporting non-profit organizations
  • the community manager
  • the employee in accounting
  • the data protection officer
  • the insurance costs
  • rent & utilities
  • event visits to grow Human Connection
  • laptops and mobile phones
  • the alarm system
  • the firewall
  • the IT service
  • the tax consultant and
  • about ten pounds of coffee a week (at least that’s what it feels like…)

We were recently accused of using the donations to pay people’s salaries.
Our core team, which consists of a handful salaried people and a number of freelancers, put in a lot of hours to develop and grow Human Connection. Most people of the core team put in more than 40 hours per week – and they simply can’t just live on air and love alone. We use our crowdfunding dollars in the most responsible way, which means we also need to pay our people so that they can focus all their energy and talent on building Human Connection.

For anyone who has questions about how and where our funds are allocated, we invite you to join our regular Meet The Team meetings and talk to us about your concerns!

We would like to take this opportunity to thank our supporters once again for their trust: We’re all working on the same mission and that is to build a platform that serves the world – not someone’s bank account.

Here’s to Human Connection – YOUR social, knowledge and action network!

Your Human Connection Team