Financial Transparency
I know some of you may have been curious, so I wanted to break down some of the financials of the groups 🙂 I’m going to try to give a lot of detail, and plan to continue to work on this over the coming months ❤️
I wish I could just be completely 100% open about everything without fear, but there are a lot of angry men out there who want to come after me or my loved ones if given the chance. So please keep this in mind when I redact information or don’t give full detail on something.
GoFundMe
By far the largest and most widely publicized fundraiser was the GoFundMe, so I’m going to start with that, then cover everything else after. I created the GoFundMe after my account was disabled by Facebook (which thankfully I was able to get reversed with the help of a concerned Meta employee) and the deletion of some of our groups. The goal of the fundraiser was to help fund the development of an App based around the premise of these groups and all of the experience me and my team have learned from running these groups.
Since I don’t know how to code an app and relying on volunteers was moving incredibly slowly, it became evident that I would need to hire an outside development company to build a working app for me. The general estimates I was getting to build an app with most of the security features I wanted was quoted at roughly 40,000 to 60,000 dollars, so I set the fundraiser at 50,000 dollars.
At the time of this writing, that fundraiser has raised a total of 43,678$, of which I received 41,922$. This is a substantial amount of money and I seriously cannot thank everyone who contributed enough. However, a contract has been signed with an outside development team, and based on our estimates it’s all but guaranteed that that entire amount will be going towards paying that team to create, test, and finalize the app. By official launch it’s all but guaranteed that costs for development alone will be going above the 41,922$ total raised.
When the GoFundMe didn’t reach it’s goal, I decided to try to create and sell some promotional hats to try to make up the difference. I posted the makedatingsafeagain.com link in 80 groups, and made 39 Sales with revenue of 900.20$, meaning profit should potentially be somewhere around 500$.
I’ve included here the (heavily redacted so angry men don’t harass them) invoice and payment confirmation for the 15,000$ initial payment made to the development team in order for them to begin work. I’ve also included an email from GoFundMe asking me to verify that I am real and that I have a plan for spending the funds on the development of an app as stated.. followed by an email from them saying that I am good to go and verified after I sent them the appropriate documentation. I’ll continue to add more updates as the development team makes progress and as additional payments are made.
Additional Funding
I’ve seen speculation as to how much money I’ve made, which is one of the main reasons why I decided to take the time to make this page. I’m hoping that being more open about the finances behind these groups can help assure you that we aren’t in this for the money.
The first time I ever directly asked was in June of last year. At that time I was spending about 30 hours a week on running, maintaining, and growing these groups, and didn’t think anyone would take issue with me asking if anyone was willing to completely voluntarily give money if they so chose. Let me tell you.. people have always taken issue with it.
Myself and the moderators have asked for donations and contributions on multiple occasions over the 15 months that the groups have existed. For an estimate on how successful those asks have been, the GoFundMe alone has raised more than all other avenues of income combined since starting these groups ~15 months ago.
Earlier this month, we started using a new @awdtsgmoderators Venmo in our pinned posts, and I am distributing all donations to it amongst all of the moderators. In many of the early asks I included my personal payment accounts (@hownowpaopao, $hownowpaopao, etc.) Creating this new account allowed me to completely separate group transactions from any personal transactions, which allows me to show exactly how much came in to us after our post earlier this month.
On May 9th we posted a way to donate in 80 total cities with a combined total of 1,954,600 members. We shared options to pay through Venmo, a Cashapp, and/or a BuyMeACoffee. In the 3 weeks since that post, a total of 1297$ was donated. Or, put another way, 0.0006$ per member. I’ve included a video showing all donations on venmo, a video showing the donations through CashApp, and a picture showing the total donated on BuyMeACoffee.
I’ve had a Patreon to cover group expenses since July, and also created a BuyMeACoffee for the group around that same time. Since both of these have no personal transactions on them, it’s easy for me to include them here as well. Since starting it, the Patreon has paid out 3400.70$, and the AWDTSG BuyMeACoffee has raised 1985$. I’ve included both of these totals, as well as a single month’s invoice from my lawyer that totaled 5,674$ (which is just more than the entire amount ever given on both Patreon and GoFundMe combined)
Outside of the GoFundMe (which, again, is 100% going towards paying a development team and is not being kept by me at all), total donations have not exceeded 30,000$ while total expenses have definitely exceeded 20,000$ (In a future update to this page I plan to write out more on these numbers). I alone have consistently put in 50+ hours per week for at least the last 8 months, and hundreds of others have contributed thousands of hours as well over the last year.
Conclusion
I’m writing this all out not to garner pity, nor in order to push for more donations (though I know the trolls aren’t going to believe that one 🙃). I wrote this out because it just felt like there were too many people out there thinking I’m making a ton of money off of doing this. I’m not sure if some of the trolls just assume it because they can’t fathom people putting this much effort into something that isn’t making them rich or what.. but I decided to be transparent about it to help quell those assumptions.
Anytime we’ve done any sort of post for donations it was to stay ahead of expenses, to feel appreciated, or to fund paying people to help me create new ways to help women stay safe.
I mean yeah, just like anyone else I would love to make a lot of money at some point. I’ve spent my whole life not having much of it, and I would love to be able to support my whole family for life. And of course I realize that there is future potential here. But even if I never make money off of this, that’s perfectly fine with me.
So, if it’s not about money, then why am I doing all of this work? Well, It’s because I like being able to be a part of something important, and I like being able to help make a difference. Also.. I’m not a quitter. There are a lot of people out there that would love to see me quit, and I’m not going to give them the satisfaction.
I know that proof doesn’t mean anything to trolls and that no matter how much I put out there and no matter how transparent I am.. once someone has decided to hate me they’re going to continue to hate me and assume negative things. Despite knowing this, I decided that I would put this out there regardless. Maybe putting it out there will at the very least help answer some questions that some of you rational normal people might have.
If you made it this far, thank you so much for taking the time to read all this! I hope it in some way helped bolster your faith in me and in this community ❤️
