FUNDRAISER Time

[Helene]

Dear Members,

It is now time for our yearly fundraiser for the monthly hosting fee for both Ballet Alert and Ballet Talk for Dancers, and we need to raise enough money to cover them for the next year. As in the past, we will close the fundraiser when we've made our target, and we will not launch another until our coffers are near empty. We will keep asking until we reach the target.

We have set the standard donation at $20, like last year. We will graciously and gratefully accept whatever you can send.

It's a drop-down box again. Until our site support HTML5, which allows the data sent from an input box to be recognized as a number by our processor, I won't be able to add a box for custom amounts, which, for now, can only be donated by check.

You may donate by credit card (American Express, Mastercard, Visa, Discover) through the box in the upper right corner of the home page. You will be redirected to the First Data processing site ("YourPay Connect") to collect your payment details. First Data is one of the world's largest credit card processing sites, and they've secured these pages.

If you prefer to pay by check, please make them out to to BALLET TALK, as we have a dedicated bank account in that name. We had to combine the two boards for the account, and could not use two separate names, so we decided to just call it Ballet Talk for the banking purposes.

Ballet Talk

11165 Abbotts Station Dr.

Duluth, GA 30097

THANK YOU!!!!!!!!!!!

Victoria Leigh and Helene Kaplan

[sandik]

And many thanks to the two of you, as well as to your cadre of editors, moderators and assorted assistants, for the effort you put in to making this such a pleasant place to play!

[KarenAG]

Thank you, Helene and Victoria, for generously donating your time and resources to this effort. I'll make my donation this weekend.

~ Karen

[cubanmiamiboy]

It's been a real pleasure to be part of this. Thank you all!

[abatt]

Thank you for operating this site. It is a pleasure.

[Helene]

Hi again, folks.

We're about 25% there, and we appreciate everything we've received so far. We still have a way to go, and I'm hoping we can meet our goals quickly, so that we don't start to resemble the nearly constant PBS/NPR fundraisers.

Thank you!

[Victoria Leigh]

Hello everyone!

We got off to a great start, and we really appreciate your generous donations so far, but I'm afraid that it has slowed down too much this past week. We are at 50% now, slightly over, but that still only covers half a year, so please get your donations in as soon as you can so that we don't have to either keep going endlessly on this one, or have another one in a few months.

Just a reminder to PLEASE put your screen name or email address on the donation form or check!!! I trying to get a thank you note to everyone, but it is complicated if I don't know who you are! Thank you!

Victoria

[Victoria Leigh]

Sunday, March 10, update. A few checks came in and we have hit the two-thirds mark. This is great! But, we really need your help if we are going to get this board paid for through March of next year!. With 3500 members here, and 15500 on BTforD, I was really hoping for more than 67 donations by this time. To those who have donated, we really appreciate your generosity and your appreciation of Ballet Talk for Dancers and Ballet Alert! If you have not done it yet, please think about getting it done as soon as possible. Thank you!!!

[Helene]

We've had some very generous responses from the Ballet Alert! crowd, and we thank you and the people who use and suggest to others that they use our amazon.com search box at the bottom of each page for amazon.com searches. Every donation supports the server on which both sites reside.

We do have a bottom line for maintaining both of the sites, and we've tried to avoid having to have more than one fundraiser per year. To keep this to a minimum and to confirm that we serve a purpose, we need to receive moderate donations on a broad scale, and we hope that if you haven't already, that you will help us.

[sandik]

FYI -- if you're having trouble finding the "box in the upper right hand corner of the home page," look at the home page for Ballet Talk for Dancers -- not Ballet Alert. I'm not a participant at BT4Dancers, and so kept wondering "where is this box..."

[Helene]

The donation form should be visible on Ballet Alert's nome page, to the right of the forums and just above the recent calendar listings. The amazon.com box is there when the fundraiser is closed, but there is one at the bottom of every page.

Some ad blockers have suppressed the amazon.com box, treating it like ! Pop-up window, but this is the first time I've been made aware that the donation form isn't visible, and ad blockers should suppress the form on BT4D, too or show it on both sites, since the code is the same.

Is anyone else having this problem? If so, what browser are you usung?

[sandik]

I've got an iMac running OSX version 10.8, with Firefox version 19.0.2

In Ballet Alert I don't have an Amazon box at the top of the page, but do have it at the bottom. If I click over to Ballet Talk for Dancers, there's a form on the right hand side of the page, with a button to minimize/maximize it, along with an Amazon box at the bottom of the page.

[Helene]

I'm sorry: I thought you meant the fundraiser form.

The fundraiser form takes the space of amazon.com box during the fundraiser, but it appears at the bottom of every page.

[Victoria Leigh]

Hi everyone on Ballet Alert! I received a number of posts lately stating that they can't get the donation form to work. There seem to be some problems with certain browsers not handling the form and giving an error page. So, I tried it, using Google Chrome, which is my usual browser, and immediately got an error page. So, I went to Safari, and it went right through and I had an immediate receipt, both in my personal box, and the email notifications came right away to Ballet Talk's Contact Us email account.

So, it seems that a part of the reason for the huge slow down in donations lately might be due to this problem. Please, if you can, try a different browser! We are close, but not there, and not nearly as close as I would like to be after this much time having the donation box there on the home pages of our sites! Would love to get this over with very soon!!! We are just barely over two-thirds of the way there in terms of getting us through another year. I really do not want to run another fund raiser in 8 months.

[California]

I used Internet Explorer 9 and the form worked just fine.

[Helene]

I've been testing both sites over the last few days, and I get through right away with Windows 7 and Google Chrome, Firefox (PC version), and IE9 and with Lion and Firefox (Mac version) and Safari on my Mac, as well as Safari on my iPad (Gen 1, last operating system). Unfortunately, my MacBook is too old to upgrade to Mountain Lion, the latest Mac operating system.

I'm not sure why I can see the form and get no errors, but others are having trouble seeing the form in the first place, seeing it on BT4D and not Ballet Alert, or getting error messages. Sometimes connecting to the server is delayed by 5-10 seconds, but I can see from the browser -- tab or message in lower left corner -- that it's trying to connect to First Data before I get the payment form.

If someone would let me know what error message they are getting, and if you can tell if it's a connectivity error (time-out, page not found) or one that is branded "Your Pay Connect" or with any other logo, I might be able to troubleshoot further, and I'd appreciate it very much.

[Helene]

We're a little over 75% there. If you've considered contributing to Ballet Alert!/Ballet Talk for Dancers, we'd really appreciate it if you do, so that we can turn off the fundraiser for another year. We don't ask for more than we need to manage the sites for a year.

[Victoria Leigh]

THANK YOU EVERYONE!!!!!!!!!!!! We hit goal this morning, so the fundraiser can come down for another year!

[vipa]

THANK YOU EVERYONE!!!!!!!!!!!! We hit goal this morning, so the fundraiser can come down for another year!

Thank you and everyone else who does the work to keep it going!

[sandik]

Excellent -- thanks so much to everyone who helps keep the playground open!

[Bonnette]

Wonderful news. My thanks to those who keeps the forum running so beautifully.

[bart]

Thanks Victoria, Helene, and everyone else who supported the fundraiser. I know how much work this is, and am grateful for what you do. Wishing everyone -- fans, dancers, those who love dancers, etc. -- another great year of talk and information-sharing .