Literacy Rate – Lowndes County, Mississippi

I found some online statistics about literacy in Lowndes County, MS.

In 1992 the percentage of the population lacking “basic prose literary skills” was estimated at 21%. In 2003 that number had improved to 16%. I don’t know if it is fair to extrapolate another 10 years, but if it were, 2013 would be at 11%.

Do you think 11% of the population in our area should be kept away from The Tale of Two Cities because they cannot read?

(And the situation in the next county south of us is: 2003 – 28% lacking “basic prose literary skills”)

I think classic literature has timeless value. Sure, a lot of more modern works also are valuable and I would broadcast those if I had the ability to do so. But the old stuff is good and it is freely available.

The leap to be made is whether hearing The Tale of Two Cities on the radio would actually improve the literacy situation. Isn’t that an interesting question? I think we should try it and find out.

The only way to make that happen is that either a) it has to have commercial viability for some station to switch from the current radio fare or b) someone like you will offer to help set up, fund and run a non-profit to do it.

Here is an opportunity, for the price of a used car we can try it out and see what happens. I hope you will join us.

I actually put on a white shirt and my one and only necktie in order to record a new video today for our IndieGoGo funding page. I am uploading it to youtube now. That takes quite awhile.

This one is pretty straight, nothing too humorous. And I attempted to put in a more pointed appeal for help. Maybe that will get some contributions coming in.

I was doing some reading about crowdfunding this week. And they had a number of good points, one of which was to keep updating the project page and sending out tweets and generally keep the thing churning a bit. We set ours up as 45 day project so we are 1/3rd of the way through. The article said that there was usually a burst at the beginning then
a bit of a slump and a burst at the end. I’m hoping we have a _big_ burst at the end.

We aren’t going to get too emotionally wrapped up in it. It reminds me of having something for sale up on Ebay: it is easy to sit there hitting refresh all day to see if anyone is bidding. We don’t want to do that.

So I’m loading more content, fiddling around with this PA/telephone interface box, and working on other aspects of the project. There are lots of things to do without fretting about the funding campaign.

I’m on a business trip this week. I am working in Colorado for a few days.
While here, I stopped in at the university’s surplus sales barn and had a look through their piles of interesting stuff. I usually try to pick up a new mouse or keyboard while I’m in the area.

It just so happened that they had a box which is used to interface between a PA system like you might find in a hotel conference/convention center, and a telephone. I was able to buy it very cheaply and I think I can make it work as an audio/telephone connection for our radio station.

One of our “rewards” we have been advertising on the fundraising site at indiegogo.com is to have our contributor give a 60 second testimonial about their favorite book. So I have been on the lookout for a way to interface telephone and audio system in order to record these testimonials over the phone.

If this thing works it will have saved us a couple hundred bucks, easy. If it doesn’t work then I’ll throw it into my electronics bone pile and use the parts for a ham radio project someday.

Today we opened an account on Twitter. You can follow us at @wmfhlp.

The crowd-funding thing is interesting. It seems to me like a slam-dunk that 15,000 people out of 300 million would be willing to drop $1 on our project, or almost any given project for that matter.

So the issue comes down to marketing – getting your project in front of the most people and find those folks out there with a spare dollar and enough gumption to click on “contribute now”. Or so it seems.

Our Twitter account will, we hope, add substantially to the number of people who could see our appeal.

We are having a bit of trouble getting Twitter and Facebook to talk to each other. But we will eventually get that worked out. That part is really a convenience for us since it means one entry in Twitter is echoed in Facebook.

The whole new-media thing is exciting, interesting, and sometimes frustrating!