Dear Friend of Nicaragua,

I want to address a few complaints about the $25 contribution to include your signature in the full page ads that appeared in the two Nicaraguan papers on October 13. We publicly challenged the U.S. Ambassador Paul Trivelli to stop trying to manipulate the Nicaraguan voting process. Our ads produced a strong defensive reaction from the Embassy.

The signature ad involves buying space in major media organs to put a strong message before the public at the time of our choice. The project has a substantial budget. Our total budget for these 2 full-page ads was $24,600. This was the break-even point for the project from which we set the individual cost of the ads.  Our goal was to design a campaign that could reach the break-even  point and be of minimum cost to the people who participated. We set in motion a mail and e-mail campaign to reach it.

 The Budget - The cost of each full page ad was $3,500, a total of $7,000. Our post office mailing of 22,000 pieces at non-profit rates to our lists cost 0.50 apiece, or $11,000. We also contacted our e-mail lists. To carry out the computer work, the e-mail contacts, the data entry, proofing the names and the preparation of the mailing list took collective staff time of about 170-180 hours, @$3,000.

The follow-up report to the participants costs about $500. We also pay a 12% management fee to the Quixote Center that handles the administrative infrastructure for the Quest.

We judged that $25 was the lowest amount we could charge. Since extra contributions usually push the average up to $30, we estimated that 800 signers would cover the costs.

It appears that we will make our budget by a small margin. But more than 150 people signed without sending a contribution. Fortunately those who contributed generated sufficient funds to reach the break-even point. When we had sufficient funds for the full-page ads, we crowded in as many non-contributors as we could.

It is worth stressing again that a signature ad is different from signing a petition. We paid to send a strong public message to the U.S. Ambassador on the day of our choice when the Quest forPeace/ Nicaragua Network had an observer delegation in Managua. The ads cost money. If enough people contribute a modest amount we can tackle such actions. If they don't, we can't. The message said that a significant number of North Americans had mobilized, pooled their resources and were watching the behavior of the U.S. representative. And that they were prepared to escalate and expand the struggle. The defensive reaction of the Embassy said that they got the message.