Since the earliest discussions that led to the opening of 99nicu.org in 2006, the vision of 99nicu has been to create a community for neonatal staff around the world. Regardless of backgrounds, working conditions, political contexts etc. Many people, including myself, spend many hours to “house-keep” 99nicu and we all do this for free, because we believe in the principal idea behind the project.

Still, invoices are facts of life for a web site. Servers, software, domain names, and technical support services need to be funded somehow.

Funding of 99nicu has always been an issue. I covered costs initally (... believing in good ideas...) and between 2008 and 2010, un-restricted educational grants from companies covered most, but not all, expenses.

From now on, we will try a new strategy for funding because independence is so valuable. As the 99nicu community grows larger and larger we want to emphasize and ensure the independent and non-commercial nature of our community. Consequently, we will not seek grants from companies. In the future we will rely on many small contributions from individual members.

Please contribute to 99nicu.

• sign up for a supporting membership
  
• use the Donate button on the main page or click here for to re-direct to PayPal
  
• send a donation through PayPal, addressed to stefan.johansson@99nicu.org
  

The options listed above are all based on PayPal. If you wish to make a direct bank transfer, please contact me on stefan.johansson@99nicu.org

Please feel free to comment below!

I totally agree there is a lot of value to financial independence. How many supporting members would it take to achieve that? Another possibility would be to post the project on kickstarter (http://www.kickstarter.com/). I could imagine the project could get some support through that without giving up any independence.

A stock of 150 supporting members would be great, that would cover about half of the costs for technical stuff like servers, maintenance, domain names etc. (now we have four...). The technical costs depends on the need/ambition to upgrade the software and whether there are technical problems I and/or the web host cannot solve for free.

In all, we need about 3500-4000 euro to cover everything (including books for reviews, the "free lanyards" and similar expenses)

My plan is to add a bar diagram beside the Donate button, so that everyone can see how the expenses and donations develops.

Kickstarter looks interesting, will take a look into that! (UPDATE: I realized one needs a US bank account for Kickstarter... if anyone living in the US would like to start a Kickstarter project for us, please contact info@99nicu.org)

So far, since 1/1-2011, there is only one invoice, from the web host, approx 168 euro. An easy start

Dear Stefan

I 'm somewhat confused. I thought that we needed more contributions from pharmaceutical companies and other sponsors to maintain and improve our 99NICU. Another resource would be 99 NICU conferences and workshops conducted regularly in different countries all over the year. Getting more supporting members is a nice idea as well but will it succeed?. We need to promote this more and more.

I agree with the the point of freedom for 99 nicu. We can try to mobilise the drive in our country by personally writing to our colleagues by e mail. This might help. More members and their support can turn this into a success story.

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DR. R.SELVAN

Here another idea: Gates Foundation

This might need some additional thoughts about what 99nicu wants to achieve. What goals do we want to set etc. What should 99nicu look like in 5, 10 years time?