Benefit Company Report, 2023

By Marisa Lerin Wed, 12/27/2023 - 22:12

Introduction

As many of you know, DigitalScrapbook.com is a public benefit company, which means that we exist to serve the global digital scrapbooking community and are committed to putting benefits to community and society ahead of profits.

As a registered public benefit company in the state of Oregon, we hold ourselves accountable to the state of Oregon, and to the standards of an unbiased third party to make sure that we are living up to our aspirations.

In addition to meeting third-party standards, part of our accountability as a benefit company involves sharing a little report each year in which we review how we were able to meet our goals.

Mission Statement and Manifesto

As always, our mission statement explains some of the ways we are working to achieve our goals as a Benefit Company through our company’s governance, our commitment to community, our commitment to customers, our commitment to society, and our commitment to environmental sustainability.

The DigitalScrapbook.com Manifesto is a further expression of our primary mission to support, vitalize, and build up the global digital scrapbooking community⁠.

Summary Review of Year

Here are a few key metrics and highlights related to our various goal areas:

Commitment to Community
Our primary mission at DigitalScrapbook.com remains to serve the global digital scrapbooking community as best we can by fostering community, providing access to creative resources, and promoting a spirit of generous creativity. This year we:

  • Served nearly a million completely free downloads of digital scrapbooking graphics including papers, elements, templates, and quick pages (about 2,500 free downloads every single day, on average)--for both personal and commercial use.
  • Continued to prioritize our community forums and facilitated 45,000+ new forum posts and comments across our site.
  • Hosted 12 blog trains and dozens of challenges in our forums.
  • Served thousands of views to our 130+ free digital scrapbooking tutorials.
  • Facilitated 50+ users uploading 3000+ items to the DigitalScrapbook.com Commons so they could give and receive feedback and improve their design skills in a fun and supportive environment.

All of this was made available completely for free, to everyone in our community.

A special thanks here to our team of volunteer moderators who keep our forums running smoothly and help facilitate our blog trains and challenges! Also thanks to all of our community designers in the Commons, who embody the DigitalScrapbook.com spirit of generosity and make the Commons what it is!

Finally, a huge thanks to our amazing team of designers who support our vision for generous creativity which allows us to make all of this possible. It takes a special kind of artist to be willing to get behind a public benefit company that puts serving the community ahead of profits!

Commitment to Customers
We strive to provide our customers with outstanding value, and to always respect them as complex human beings. We believe in doing difficult emotional labor to understand who our customers are and where they are coming from, so that we can serve and support them as best we can. This year we:

  • Served approximately 600,000 premium digital scrapbooking kit downloads at a small fraction of the price of most sites, thanks to our affordable subscription plans.
  • Continued to prioritize and support our generous commercial use licensing options which are unique in our industry.
  • Responded to 5,000+ support requests.
  • Responded to 300+ quality control issues (together with our amazing team of designers).
  • Collected and analyzed 1,100+ customer ratings via UserVoice, and additional ratings via TrustPilot.
  • Received a 98% positive UserVoice feedback score (besting last year's score by 1%).
  • Ended the year once again with a 4.9 out of 5 star rating on TrustPilot thanks to overwhelmingly positive verified customer reviews.

A special thanks once again to Thani, our junior webmaster and gracious customer support ninja who invests a huge amount of time, labor, and emotional energy towards serving our customers well.

Commitment to Society
DigitalScrapbook.com is a community created by artists for artists, and promoting the arts is a central part of our mission as expressed in our manifesto. This year, hundreds of people viewed our manifesto, and many of them signed it, lending momentum to our call to generosity and creativity for the digital scrapbooking community.

As another aspect of our commitment to society, DigitalScrapbook.com has a formal standing pledge to support charities in need. This year we donated $1000 to carefully-vetted charitable organizations working to alleviate suffering among children in some of the most war-torn parts of the world, including Israel/Palastine, Ukraine, and Sudan.

Thanks to Our Community ❤️

Our vision for DigitalScrapbook.com would not be possible without the support of our amazing community--that’s all of you. As always, your monetary donations this past year helped support our mission as a public benefit company, which played a huge part in allowing us to achieve our goals.

More than that, you gave your time, energy, and talents to supporting our community and making it what it is. DigitalScrapbook.com has always been an experiment in generous creativity and living out of a spirit of abundance, and the site would simply not exist without your collaboration and support.

Looking Ahead

Looking ahead, one of the challenges facing our community is how to best engage the topic of AI-assisted creation in a way that aligns with our mission, and everything that we are about as a community. We have always chosen to be optimistic about the future, rather than fearful, but will be working with our members to create some policies and guidelines around AI tools in order to help everyone to best achieve their creative goals, whatever those goals might be.

Support DigitalScrapbook.com

DigitalScrapbook.com depends on our community to survive and thrive. If you believe in our mission, please consider supporting us by subscribing for unlimited downloads (we are confident this is the best deal in digital scrapbooking), or making a small donation.

October 2023 Digital Scrapbooking Update

By Marisa Lerin Wed, 12/20/2023 - 22:00

The end of the year is approaching and soon I'll be thinking about my scrapbooking plans for 2024. I never have time in December to think about the new year, but once January rolls around I'll be thinking about it. I'm guessing it won't differ too much from what I've done this year, I'm pretty happy with what I've been up to, but I'm sure I'll change a few things up. What are you thinking about for the new year? You can see my 2023 goals here.

Memory Planner

This is the digital planner I'm using, and you can read more about digital planning here

▼ Stickers can be downloaded here.
2023 Memory Planner-19

▼ Stickers from SinyoungStudio
2023 Memory Planner-67

2023-10-01

2023-10-21
Digital Pocket Album

2023-10-15

2023-10-31

Digital Pocket Album
Keeping up with my pocket scrapping as well! You can read about my digital pocket scrapping process here.

digital scrapbook pocket page digital scrapbook pocket page

digital scrapbook pocket page digital scrapbook pocket page

On This Day Scrapbook
I got back a little into by "on this day" scrapbook, where I look back through my photo archive and pick a photo from the same day but different year. This is a nice project for when I want to make a casual layout just for fun. And it's also fun to look back through all the photos from previous years!

I'm using this notebook for this project.


digital scrapbook TN page

digital scrapbook layout

Pages