I've been getting responses from my first wave of letters and I'm hopeful. Beth Day was none too pleased with, as she put it, 'this money grubbing shit', but most people said they'll donate what they can.

I'd like to maybe send discs of the trailer to the people that donated. Is that a thing we could do?

Depends on how much they donated.

I'd also like to set up some kind of weekly newsletter for future donations.

I honestly don't know what you mean by this. Like, an NPR/PBS style continuing fund drive??

Some sort of weekly update newsletter we can send to future donors. It'll be more professional, and we won't run into Momentary Engineering-like problems.

We have a website with a blog and an e-mail mailing list already. How would this be different?

Well, usually people stop posting after principal shooting. Then people who are further removed from the group are left twisting in the wind. They are also less likely to look at the forum in the first place.

If we send out a weekly letter, then people are always updated.

And they can't bitch.

I think it would be regarded as spam. No one would sign up for it, so they'd have to be "force-subscribed," and those sorts of things are eaten by spam filters.