15 Comments

Love this! As a patient advocate who donates a portion of paid subscriptions to the Lyme community during Lyme Awareness month, I’m so happy to see others donating to a variety of charitable organizations.

Expand full comment

Feel free to join the list; we have a list only because when I tried to find a community of people doing the same thing, I couldn't find them. So, it's not meant to be a "special" group, but rather to make it easy to find the Substacks that have an explicit social mission to their paid subs strategy.

Expand full comment

Emily! This is terrific! I use paid subs at my main Stack, Quiet Reading, partly to fund paid subs at other Stacks. It strikes me this may be common. I wrote about this in a relevant post about a year ago, "The Substack Tithe / When and how to pay it forward": https://tarapenry.substack.com/p/the-substack-tithe.

I'm not currently channeling subscription funds to an outside charity, though I've done so in the past and am glad to know of your directory. Even if it stays small, it's still a good idea to showcase this feature.

Expand full comment

Excellent! Yes, in this "Get Listed!" post at the bottom, we reference PayItForward as a possible side or sub category and gave Jen Mayer's Zinestack which will have a PayItForward structure as an example. So... if there's interest (there are now two of you) we can add that as a side or sub category. Jen and I were just waiting to see if anyone who did PayItForward came forward. And, here you are!

Expand full comment

Haha! I have a guess that the PayItForward category could go kaboom with popularity. :-) But it's just a hunch.

Expand full comment

Love love love this!

Expand full comment

Hooray! We do too. Thanks for letting us know!

Expand full comment

Thanks for doing this. It strikes me that the co-founders would be interested in knowing just how many Substacks use their platform to generate funds for worthy organizations.

Expand full comment

I agree! As a newsletter with just a couple hundred subscribers I don't have the clout to get their attention but I'll give it a shot! I've got my GiveBackStack origin story post queued up for delivery in the next week... About why I chose to leverage the platform and will tag them.

Expand full comment

Does configuring Stripe to allocate a percentage of paid sub fees to the Stripe Climate pledge fit with this goal?

Expand full comment

Greetings! Great question! I chose that option as well. It doesnt fit the definition that we have laid out. But I think it could be something Substackers could call out in their about page as something they have signed up for. I don't even know where Stripe sends the money they collect and how much they keep but would be interesting to find out.

Expand full comment

I aspire to be one of this community! Right now it’s not at a sustainable level but when I get there. . . heck yeah. My target is a minimum of 50 paid subscribers.

Expand full comment

Hi Nancy, as far as I'm concerned you can join whenever you turn on paid and commit to donating your paid subs. I don't have a lot of paid subs myself, but I've set up both of mine to start donating when I reach a certain level.

Expand full comment

Cool! Then sign me up. My paid subs are turned on and I'm clear about where my target is. Thank you!

Expand full comment

I’m reading the instructions and will make the changes soon so I can apply.

Expand full comment