share your love (© Rafal Olechowski | Dreamstime.com)

As we gear up for our Hangout-a-thon this weekend, several of you awesome people have said that you want to support CosmoQuest, but you don’t have money to give.

That’s fine! We didn’t build this site with the goal of spending all of our time asking you for money to support science. In fact, our goal was to get Federal and Foundation funding and then ask you to use your brain to learn science, do science,and otherwise engage in science, and just, when you can and if you want, donate to our media like 365 Days of Astronomy. Unfortunately, sequestration and the reorganization of STEM Education funding is causing us to have to set our goals aside for a bit. (We plan to get back to that goal, we just suspect it will take at least 6 months to get there.)

Anyway… We need funding, but we want you to be more a part of our community. If you want to help and you aren’t in a position to give, there are actually a lot of tangible ways you can help. If you could do any  of the following, you’d make us head over heels happy:

1) Tell people about us: There are lots of people out there who haven’t heard about our programs. You never know who you might introduce to CosmoQuest who will make the next great discovery, become the next expert we need helping in the forums, or will just become that person we can call on when we have question about network security (we had to do this when we had our DDOS attack). Please tell people about us on your social media and real world networks. Even the occasional retweet means a lot to us.

2) Say hi to the newbies: Our site gets new visitors who will pop into the forums now and then. If you see them, can you say hi? Make them feel welcome? If you see a new name in the Twitter replies or Google+ comments, can you say hi and invite people back to the website?

3) Wiki us: We know that Wikipedia doesn’t want people/orgs writing about themselves for Wikipedia (and honestly, we don’t always have the time to do that even if it was encouraged!). Can you please make sure everything we do that you like ends up on Wikipedia?

4) List us everywhere!: The internet is a big place, and its filled with places that programs like CosmoQuest should be listed… but we don’t always know all those places. If you find someplace we should be, and we aren’t, can you either list us, or drop us a note at info@cosmoquest.org to tell us about where we’re missing. No one can call you if your number is unlisted, and we want to be listed.

5) Write reviews: The 365 Days of Astronomy podcast is in iTunes. All our video content is on YouTube. If you listen, and you like us, can you also drop us a thumbs-up/+1/like and maybe write a review? Additionally, if you can write a blog post (or create a video, or… pick your tech) reviewing our programs that would help others get an idea of who we are, and what we’re about.

Bottom line: we’re a community, and we want to be welcoming and we want to grow. If you can help us nurture our community, grow it, and make sure that people understand who and what we are, we’d be thrilled.

Helping us means sharing us, but I promise, this is a good thing 😉