After a number of false starts over a period of more than a year, I'm at last able to say: thank you for your patience, and I've now commissioned the seventh Scot Goes Pop opinion poll. The wheels will soon be getting into motion, and the results will be with you well before the end of the SNP leadership election. This new poll will be a bit shorter than the previous six, but I've done the best I can with the funds available.
In all honesty I had been minded to wait even longer, and perhaps to try to top up the funds so that there would be enough to commission the type of all-singing, all-dancing poll we've had before. However, Nicola Sturgeon's unexpected resignation finally settled the issue as far as I was concerned, because from that point on, a shorter poll in March obviously made far more sense than a longer poll in April or May.
Just to briefly recap how we got here, between the autumn of 2021 and the autumn of last year, I was plugging away at promoting a polling fundraiser which never actually reached its target figure. That fundraiser had two purposes - firstly to reimburse me for the remaining costs of a poll I ran in October 2021, and which I initially had to partly pay for with my own money, and secondly to help fund a new poll. I eventually had to temporarily give in last autumn, because even though the progress of the polling fundraiser was very sluggish, it was still diverting attention away from the Scot Goes Pop general fundraiser, and at the end of the day a man has got to eat as well as commission opinion polls. So I reverted to promoting the general fundraiser only, and there have been a number of very generous donations since then - including, incredibly, a four-figure donation. However, that fundraiser has still fallen even further short of its target than the polling fundraiser.
To cut a long story short, the Scot Goes Pop coffers will be looking relatively bare after this new poll is completed, so once the SNP leadership election is over, I'm planning to launch a brand new Scot Goes Pop fundraiser for 2023. (I think it makes sense to wait until then before launching it, because now is the time for me to be covering the leadership election as extensively as I can, and I also don't want to divert attention away from any fundraising Ash Regan or even Kate Forbes might need to do - although admittedly there's no obvious sign of any fundraising at all from any of the candidates yet, so perhaps it's not even necessary in an internal vote of this type.)
In the meantime, though, if anyone feels able and willing to contribute early by "buying me a hot chocolate" or "buying me a ham and cheese toastie", I can't deny it would be extremely helpful. Here are the options for donations at the moment...
The preferred method is direct payment via Paypal, which is usually more or less instantaneous and can eliminate fees altogether depending on the option you select from the menu. My Paypal email address is -
jkellysta@yahoo.co.uk
If you wish, you can add a note along the lines of "for the fundraiser", but even if you don't it'll still be very obvious what the payment is for.
I know not everyone has a Paypal account, in which case the best option is the Scot Goes Pop general fundraiser from last year, which is still very much open for donations. I did receive a strange email from GoFundMe a couple of nights ago implying that there might be delays in payment processing, which is one of the reasons I'm now saying Paypal is the preferred method. But the funds will still reach me eventually.
And there are always one or two people who prefer a direct bank transfer - if you'd like to do that, please email me. My contact email address is different from my Paypal email address above, and can be found either in the sidebar of this blog (desktop version only) or on my Twitter profile.
Last but not least, many thanks to the people who have donated over the last eighteen months and made this new poll possible. I can't, of course, promise positive results from the poll - all we can do is put the questions out there and see how the public react to them.