Help out Hugo

Help Out Hugo

Project 2019-02-11 14:43:27 +1300

EDIT: IT’S A CHRISTMAS MIRACLE! They’re back! At around 2.30pm today, the mysterious and powerful Facebook gods reinstated all our upcoming events (ads and content intact!) that were removed on Saturday. A huge sigh of relief from us at Team Hugo today, folks. Facebook still haven’t contacted us directly to let us know why the events were taken down and we’d still love to know why this happened, and how exactly it’s related to the spam attack on the same afternoon, but for now we’re just so stoked that life and work can continue.

It’s been a fraught and exhausting five days of overtime and buckets of tears from us all, folks. Your support was swift, beautiful and absolutely overwhelming in its volume and generosity. This fantastic outcome is most definitely the result of all your public outcry and fast and effective alarm-bell ringing. If it weren’t for you, and the push from the media, we’d still be in the dark. So thank you, thank you for your help. This is absolutely the best-case scenario.

Our dear pledgers, y’all are the literal absolute best. Your support means everything to us, and we still need it, (and are still really excited about sorting all your cool rewards out for you!). Your dosh from this campaign will go towards our recovery from this: for staff overtime, recouping advertising costs and making up lost marketing ground. It will now also be spent to help us do what we were doing already - trying to get a little local queer events business out of the woods. To pay our cast and crew fairly and provide great development opportunities for them, to take meaningful shows to places that need em, to make art and make people happy. With your help we’ll continue to make validating, smutty, politically-charged, rough-around-the-edges late-night cabaret AND make ends meet at the same time.

But considering the circumstances under which you donated have now changed, we’d like to give you some options. If you feel it would be better used elsewhere in the world or back in your life, we’d really, really like you to have it back. All you need to do is email [email protected] and their amazing team will sort you out if you’d like to lower, retract or change your pledge. We’ll also get in touch with you all by email real soon to make sure you’re aware of this bloody great new development.

Thanks again everyone, we’re just so relieved this chapter is over. We’ll see you at some shows sometime, cool? Cool.

Eat ya veges, f the patriarchy, tell ya mates you love them. Lots of love, from George, Hugo and the crrrew xoxox

"Hey everybody! As some of you may already be aware, the Hugo Grrrl events team suffered a really devastating loss on the weekend - most of our Hugo content was reported to Facebook and all of our events were deleted. It looks like it was a deliberate attack on us. We had over a hundred individual nights of shows removed, some with over two thousand people attending. Hundreds of hours of work, and thousands of dollars in advertising, years of cumulative work and our entire marketing machine has disappeared without notice, reason or warning. We’re not sure why this has happened but we’re working hard to find out more. What we do know is that recovering from this in the coming months is going to be really tough.

So! All our events are still on! (Check our Eventfinder for our full calendar.) But this has jeopardised the income of a whole network of local creative people. We have commitments to pay venues, crew, our organising team and, of course, performers. Currently our staff are clocking mad overtime with no end in sight. The funds we raise here will primarily go to paying these hardworking young queers in this hella stressful time. It will also go towards unforeseen advertising costs as we play fast and furious catch-up on event marketing. We also anticipate a drop in attendance at over the coming months as a result of the loss of our online events, which may affect our bottom line for the coming year. We've set our goal for $2.5k which defs won't cover everything, but will absolutely, absolutely help us survive in the short term.

Long story short, we’re a tiny local queer business trying to make meaningful, validating, inclusive and, most of all, fun gigs AND trying to make ends meet at the same time. We’re stretched to our limit, in crisis, and need any help you can give.

If you can’t give financially, that’s very okay. You can help by letting people know what’s happened, promoting the bejesus out of events as they reappear, and bringing our friends for a fun and gorgeous night out to one of our future shows. It’d be lovely to see you there.

If you can offer your time to help us rebuild, your legal or social media expertise, thank you. Please email [email protected] with REBUILD in the subject line, details of what exactly you’re able to offer, and we’ll get back to you.

If you can give financially, here’s the place to do it. Here’s some of the rewards we can offer at this stage. We’d also love to hear your feedback on rewards you’d like that maybe we haven’t thought of yet! We’ll let you know if your suggestions are realistic for us at this time and maybe add them to this list. Also, if you have a skill or service you’re able to offer a pledge reward, we’d love to hear from you too.

NB! Since this is a short campaign, if you’re you are a bit worried about payday, note that a pledge is just a commitment to pay. If you select bank transfer, you have some leeway after the campaign has closed to actually make the payment.

Also, if you see more than one reward that tickles your fancy, note that you can pledge more than once.

Thanks again, so much for your support, folks. Let's get the team on it's feet again."

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