Posted by AaronClausen
Hi everyone,
Thank you for the strong sense of support and all the responses and feedback we received re: NatureMapr's funding challenges and the future of the service.
We know how important the platform is to so many of you.
Just to provide a short update, we continue to collate all the advice we are receiving and are exploring all options.
Michael Mulvaney and I met with the ACT Environment Minister and have presented our case for additional support.
We are applying for major support from the Commonwealth via a saving our species through innovation grant and may look to the community to provide any letters of support to support our application.
We have been fortunate to receive offers for assistance from a couple of amazing, local businesses who are helping us with a cost benefit analysis that can be presented to government in ministerial brief form as well as an important formal survey for you to complete as a NatureMapr user or stakeholder.
We will be distributing the survey regarding NatureMapr's future to all users and stakeholders later this week, so please keep an eye out for it and make sure you tell us what you think.
The survey will give us an accurate overall picture of what is most important to our stakeholders, how we might best pursue much needed support and where we go from here.
Just with regards to a couple of the suggestions that people have been raising - one is the introduction of some form of paid membership type for heavy and/or premium users such as land managers and land holders.
While we sincerely appreciate that some of our heavier users would be prepared to purchase a paid membership (you are amazing thank you), we don't believe we have sufficient scale for this option to make a significant enough difference to the overall situation. Services such as strava and others have generally grown to several million users prior to the introduction of a paid/premium membership option.
The survey will outline all of the options we have in front of us and we want to know which option(s) you would support in order of preference.
As of right now, we are waiting for an invoice to clear that will cover the cost of our infrastrucure for the next couple of months - we are absolutely on the cusp and just about needing to subsidise with cash flow from the IT business again.
We want to do whatever we can to properly set up the NatureMapr platform and community for long term success and stability.
Please keep an eye out for the survey link in the coming days and thanks everyone for your continued support while we work through this.
Cheers
Aaron.
