Funds Transferred to American Red Cross

Well, we finally figured it all out.

All funds donated via the Liberal Blogosphere for Hurricane Relief campaign have been transferred to the American Red Cross hurricane relief fund. We had a bit of a hang-up as we negotiated with PayPal to waive some of the fees - and as the Red Cross organized itself to accept our donations.

Some transaction details:
* Donors donated a gross total of $181,548.73.
* After PayPal's regular transaction fees, that amounts to $175,641.32 (a net fee of just 3.254%)
* We transferred all $175,641.32 to the Red Cross - and PayPal waived their usual 2% transfer fee, saving $3512.83.
* The transaction was processed through the American Red Cross Oregon Trail Chapter, but all funds are being delivered internally to the national hurricane relief fund.

Some details for donors:
* All donors will receive an email momentarily from me, acknowledging their donation - including contact info for the person at the Red Cross who can verify this transaction.
* All donors who gave over $200 will receive a follow-up email receipt from the Red Cross. (This is their policy across all donation channels - as they're simply too overwhelmed.)

Some details for the curious:
* There were 2204 donors, giving from $1 to $2000.
* Median donation was $50. Average donation was $82.37.
* The DropCash-reported total of $180,414.00 is slightly low due to a few folks who went around the DropCash system.
* Over the two week campaign, the donated ads from the Liberal Blog Ad Network were viewed some 25 million times (not including DailyKos, which hosted their own copy separately). An additional 3.4 million ad impressions were donated by other BlogAds members - and hundreds of blogs ran the ad's HTML, generating an untold number of impressions.

Thank you to everyone who supported the campaign and to everyone who donated.

We made a difference.