My name is Manel Tomás. I’m CitizenGO’s Chief Operating Officer. Our President Ignacio Arsuaga has written to you a few times this year about CitizenGO’s budget, and, unfortunately, I am sending this email with some bad news about CitizenGO’s 2022 fundraising.

I know that these emails are never nice to receive, so I want to promise you two things at the very top.

1. Unlike many other organizations, CitizenGO does not believe in manufacturing crises or manipulating our members into donating to us by lying about the true state of our finances. I assure you that I will not be doing that in this email.
2. If this email succeeds in helping us close our 2022 budget gap, I promise that you will not hear from me again for the rest of the year!

Here is the bottom line: As of this writing, CitizenGO still needs 2,625 people to start a monthly donation before the end of this month to ensure that we have the sustained resources we need to fund our work in 2023. I'll provide more details below, but first I want to ask if you can help us close our budget gap by starting a $5 monthly donation today:

Let me give you a peek behind the curtain of CitizenGO's budget.

We often tell you that CitizenGO is funded primarily by small-dollar grassroots donations from people like you. But to be more specific, 98% of our 2022 budget was set to come from people like you, receiving emails like this and chipping in what they could.

CitizenGO relies especially on donors who give monthly, because it allows us to predict how much money we will have months or even years down the line to spend on the critical work that we do. And all the monthly donations, no matter how small, add up. If we are able to meet our goal of 2,625 new monthly donors, that will translate into $300,000 in 2023!

Focusing on small donations of $5, $10, or $25 has been a core tenet of CitizenGO's mission since our founding in 2013, because it ensures that we can remain fiercely independent and responsible to only our members, not the whims of a single large donor who writes us a check.

But over the last year, we have seen a dramatic drop in our grassroots fundraising. It's been particularly surprising that this happened during a year when we’ve seen a redoubling of attacks against our pro-life and pro-family values, which historically have been times of increased energy and giving.

And it's not just us—donations to other prolife and profamily organizations have been on the decline across the board.

I'm concerned by that trend not just for CitizenGO, but because radical pro-abortion groups, fanatic LGBTQ+ organizations, and haters of Christian values are entering 2023 with tens of millions of dollars in the bank—ready to fund candidates, ballot measures, and terrifying totalitarian policies.

The good news is that CitizenGO has never needed to match these groups dollar-for-dollar. For almost 10 years we have been nimble, innovative, and frugal—but given how hard it has been to meet our fundraising goals this year, I'm concerned that we are not going to have the money we need to fight back.

So I'm asking. Can you help us close our budget gap by starting a $5 a month donation today? Every single dollar counts.

You may be wondering what CitizenGO will do with that $300,000 next year if we manage to reach our goal.

The short answer is: a lot!

Some of that money will be put toward research and development of new techniques to identify, energize, and mobilize young people and profamily voters.

Some will be put in our reserves so that when crises happen—as they did past summer when our directors of campaigns in Africa and the UK, Ann Kioko and Caroline Farrow, were under terrible personal attacks for bravely standing up for life and family—we are able to immediately dive in and do whatever is needed to fight back.

Some will be used to help fund small, underfunded but critically important organizations doing direct service work on the ground, in front of abortion centers, to save babies' lives; or battling back to avoid our children being groomed and brainwashed at schools in gender ideology.

And some will be used to ensure that CitizenGO is able to continue paying our incredible, hardworking staff the fair wages that we believe every single worker deserves.

I know that you've been asked for a lot this year, and I am so grateful for all that you have done. I just need to ask you one more time if you can help keep CitizenGO strong in 2023 by starting a $5 monthly donation today: