The Radiant Vista continues to be in a fantastic period of growth and we are extremely grateful to all of our viewers who have helped to support and grow The Radiant Vista Community. Your participation and donations have made it possible for us to produce and deliver the content that we have created so far.
The initial goal of The Radiant Vista was to build a website where the founding contributors could give away who they were as teachers to promote workshops. We saw the idea of The Radiant Vista as a much more connected way to advertise workshops than simply buying ad space. We never imagined a day where this effort and your embracing of the content would lead to a web site that would transfer over 5 terabytes of information to over 80,000 visitors a month.
The success of The Radiant Vista is a double-edged sword. Our original goal of promoting workshops has been reached and far surpassed. Our unique, high quality, video content has obviously become an end to itself for many, many photographers all over the world. Creating and transferring all of that information has become expensive to the point that it far exceeds any advertising budget that could ever be supported by photography workshops.
With the current number of visitors and information transfer, we have $1800.00 per month in expenses, which only includes bandwidth, server, and maintenance costs. These expenses do not include compensation for any of the contributors.
For quite a while we looked at going to either advertising on the website or to a subscription based service to offset these base costs. Based on our best judgment and a lot of feedback we decided against both of those models in favor of seeking donations.
The great news is that 2 weeks of content will always be free on The Radiant Vista. However, in order to accommodate this, we need your help and have an ongoing goal to raise the $1800 per month for the ongoing maintenance costs of the website.
To assist us with hitting this goal each month, we have created The Benefactor Program that offers a number of different incentives to donors that make contributions of $100 or more.
Some of the benefits are:
- 10% Off Radiant Vista Goodies, Downloads, etc.
- One Free Extended Access Window - a $49.95 value!
- $50 Off Radiant Vista Workshops
- $20 Off Radiant Vista Weekends
- Early notification and pre-registration for all workshops
All of the donations are processed securely through Paypal, but you do not need a Paypal account to make a donation.
Open Amount One Time Donation
$100.00 One Time Benefactor Donation
$10.00 Per Month Ongoing Benefactor Donation
If we all contribute and participate in the idea of mutual exchange the amount of donations we are seeking is ultimately a very small amount of money relative to the total number of photographers who benefit from the free, high quality, information available for download on The Radiant Vista. However, we are all aware that terms like "small amount" and "money" are relative. One of the most amazing things about the internet is the community spirit of much of what happens online. If any amount of money is too large for you to contribute right now please consider making a contribution to our Community forum with the gift of sharing a picture or by helping a fellow photographer in the form of an encouraging post or a heartfelt review of an image.
Two years ago the founding contributors of The Radiant Vista wrote this simple credo...
The Radiant Vista is a creative community of inspiration, passion, and grace. Together we pursue our dreams and explore our endless potential.
Please consider making a donation today! We really appreciate your support!
Best regards,
Matt, Mark, and Craig