Thank you!

Thanks again to all of you who support IDEA. Your dedication to the archive has taken many forms over the years, from monetary donations, to bragging about us on social media, to reposting our posts, to simply visiting the site. We’d like to say a special thanks to everyone who donated during our 2018 online fundraiser, which we launched to help pay for the increasing costs of running IDEA, which lacks a major source of funding. While we’re extremely grateful to those who contributed, unfortunately, the cumulative results weren’t enough to fund IDEA over the long term. Going forward, I’m afraid we won’t be able to rely solely on these types of fundraisers to keep the archive afloat.

First and foremost, we’ve pledged to keep IDEA free. And turning IDEA into a flashy site crammed with multiple advertisements is likely as objectionable to you as it is to us. So we’ve come up with what we feel is a common-sense, unobtrusive way to keep IDEA free to everyone while finding the income to pay our bills.

In the widget section on the right side of each IDEA page, you will now notice one extra graphic devoted to IDEA sponsorships and thanks-you messages. Rest assured that every sponsor we accept will relate to IDEA’s mission (theatre schools, theatre and film companies, arts publications, actors’ services, and other entities related to the world of linguistics, accents and English language studies). We think this is the best and most tasteful way to keep IDEA free while also promoting products and services of interest to you. No banner ads, no annoying pop-ups, and, best of all, only sponsors related to IDEA’s content.

Between your individual support and a limited number of topic-appropriate sponsors, we hope to keep the lights on at IDEA forever, guaranteeing a free and permanent home to our ever-growing library of dialect and accents samples from around the world.

Lastly, we’d like to thank our editors, without whom IDEA would not exist. The value of their contributions to the archive is incalculable, and they do it all for free. (Any money raised by sponsorships and donations goes instead to website hosting, e-mail hosting, web design, research, plug-ins, domain registration, and all the other business related to maintaining and improving a website that gets more than three millions hits a year.) So please join us in thanking them for their two decades of support.