Happy Valentine’s Day! Oh wait… no Valentine? No worries! Spend the money you would have used for flowers on Bwog!

Attention, avid Bwog readers!

Starting this Sunday, we’ll be running our FIRST-EVER Bwilanthropy Week! From February 16 through 23, 2025, we’ll be asking our lovely readers to donate to Bwog. Right now, our goal is to raise $4k this week to cover our ongoing costs to keep our website running.

Even $5 would help us enormously, and we’re accepting donations of all amounts! If you’re in a position to donate, our PayPal is linked here (and in the right sidebar on our site). If you can’t donate money but still want to help, please consider reposting on social media and sharing the Bwilanthropy Week graphics that we’ll be posting on Instagram this week.

If you’ve ever been helped by Bwog when you were looking for a place to live, searching for ways to tackle your first semester at Columbia, or trying to find a new recipe to make in your dorm when you’re sick of dining hall food, please consider donating to Bwog! 

Over the past year, Bwog has also been working hard to provide readers with fast, reliable breaking news articles regarding University updates. We’ve reported on: 

We know that many of our off-campus readers rely on this news to be in-the-know about breaking news at Columbia and Barnard, and we hope to continue providing this coverage!

What will we use the money for? Bwog is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit and a completely undergraduate-run student news organization. For journalistic integrity reasons, we’re independent from Columbia. Unlike other clubs on campus, we receive no funding from the University, and we rely solely on funds from donations and ads. We have several recurring monthly costs to keep our website up and running. These include:

  • Linode (our website hosting software)
  • Google Workspace (our @bwog.com email addresses and Google drive)
  • Mailchimp (our email listserv that we use to send out our weekly BwogLetter and FreshLetter in the summer)

We also occasionally use money for Bwog staff social events, which happen about twice per semester, to help create a community for our staff members.

We make some money from running advertisements on our website, but much of our budget comes from donations from our generous readers, including alumni, current students, students’ parents, and other Columbia community members who benefit from our articles.

We publish around five to seven posts a day, and we truly appreciate every bit of support from our readers so we can keep publishing Columbia- and Barnard-centered content for our community!

Wikiplea via Rory Collins