News : Goals for Vinton Today as we Prepare our New Website

Our annual fund drive is drawing to an end. We want to thank all the donors who have contributed so generously. Many of our regular contributors gave again this year and your support is very much appreciated. If you’ve considered sending in a few bucks but just haven’t gotten around to it, here’s something to think about.

As a result of the very strong support we’ve received over the years, we have adopted new and very ambitious goals.

We would like to make our news platform available to every community served by school districts operating in our county.

The trick is to provide free access to our platform for 13 more communities without significantly changing our loyal readers’ experience. In other words we want to add a lot more content without creating a more cluttered experience for anyone. As I heard recently, this is like giving the bear a bath without getting it wet. Still, we think with hard work and some creativity we can get that done.

We are able to adopt this goal because of your generosity, to accomplish it. We want to accomplish the goal because we believe our entire county needs access to the same news platform.

Benton Development Group has been transformed into an effective advocate for the economic development of Benton County. As communities we need to leverage the capabilities of our entire area, not just each individual town individually. That is almost impossible to do if people in one community have no idea as to what is going on or available in another community.

Another of our projects is to make our site accessible to the visually impaired

As home to the Iowa Braille and Sightsaving School, as the home community of the Lions Club that adopted service to the visually impaired long before it became a national Lions project, this should have been a no-brainer. We’re sorry to say it wouldn’t have occurred to us without a nudge from Carolyn Hibbs.

Carolyn and Mike have been steady, generous donors to Vinton Today since we began doing fund drives five years ago. Carolyn asked that we make the site accessible to the visually impaired if ever we found the opportunity.

This isn’t just about making the screen bigger or brighter, or even having the computer read the words aloud. Carolyn brought our attention to something we’d never considered. It does no good to have audible articles if you can’t find them; the menus and hyperlinks must be made audible as well.

We are committed to making this happen and we will devote significant resources from our fundraising to accomplish it.

Vinton Today wasn’t started as a way to make money. We hoped the journalist doing the work could make a decent living. We hoped the site could pay for the web hosting and programming required to keep it functional. Those goals have been achieved. Now with more abundant resources we can look toward improvements that will improve the well-being of our larger community; those who live beyond Vinton and our friends and neighbors cut off from easy access to news and information.

Our most important goal is continue to do what we've done, be Vinton Today. We have no plans to change our coverage of Vinton, but we do want to know what's happening around our county. Vinton is after all the county seat, and we'd like to better be able to put Benton County on the map like we have Vinton.

Thank you again for your generous support. If you haven’t yet contributed but would like to, please know that your donations will speed us along toward our goal of providing everyone with free 24/7 access to the important news of our communities.

To donate, CLICK HERE.