Just visit our subscribe page, here. All funds from any new subscription purchased from March 8th until the March 14th will be donated.
If you already have a subscription, we suggest that you just donate directly to Direct Relief. You can do that here.
Direct Relief is a top-rated emergency health care and disaster relief charity as rated by Charity Navigator, and as the name suggests, nearly all of its receipts cover program costs. (We chose to avoid organizations where a high percentage of receipts cover administration.) In conjunction with the Ukrainian Ministry of Health, it is already distributing medical aid to Ukrainians fleeing the conflict.
No, we will make a one-time donation on your behalf. After your initial payment, your subscription will process normally, and it will support the local journalism the Bangor Daily News publishes every day.
Once you have subscribed, you can take your subscription off auto renew at any time from your My Account page. If you do that, you will retain access until your renewal date.
No. We are not a 501(c)(3) or other nonprofit organization – we’re just turning over any revenues we generate from new digital subscriptions between March 8th and 14th to the recipient organization. If you want to make a tax deductible donation, you can always donate from Direct Relief’s page, but you won’t enjoy the benefits of subscription when you do so.
We will remit the tax amount you send to us to the State of Maine, as usual. From their perspective, there isn’t any difference between your subscription purchase and any other purchase. The difference to us is that we will remit your payment to Direct Relief.
The newsroom will publish evidence of our remitted payment to Direct Relief on conclusion of this campaign. We will also publish the number of subscriptions purchased.
We will retain subscribers who do not choose to cancel their subscriptions at the end of the campaign, but we won’t claim tax benefits for this campaign, and we have no relationship with the charity we are donating to. Besides that, we aren’t expecting any return from this campaign except the knowledge that some Mainers will have joined us in contributing during this difficult time.
The war in Ukraine is moving quickly, and new subscriptions process either quarterly or annually – we don’t know what the state of the world will be in two weeks, let alone in 13 weeks or a year. The events of the past several weeks have shocked and horrified us, and with support from new subscribers, contributing to Direct Relief is the best thing we can think of to do. Like most local newspapers, our resources are limited, and the duration of this campaign balances our desire to help with our need to plan prudently for the future.
We feel moved to act by the exceptional and urgent events we’re witnessing, and we know that many others in our state feel mobilized by these events, too. With this campaign, we are responding to concern and grief among our audience, and among BDN staff.
As far as contributing in our own backyard, we work hard to keep Mainers informed about the state they love every day, and we already do that by addressing intractable issues in Maine. That won’t ever change. When you see difficult issues that need the attention of local journalists to come to light, tell us about them.
After we launched this campaign, an anonymous donor came forward with a commitment to match every dollar earned through this campaign. Once the campaign is complete we will let the donor know what has been raised and they will make a matching contribution. Basically, for every dollar spent on new digital subscriptions from March 8 to March 14, we will now be able to donate $2 to humanitarian relief.