The MinnPost and BrauBlog finished strong in their micro-sponsorship campaign, adding 45 additional micro-sponsorships over the last two days.

When I spoke with David Brauer on Monday he thought the MinnPost would probably finish with about $12,000 raised (it was in the $11,000s then), but a late surge easily broke the $13,000 barrier. The campaign had a matching component from the Harnisch Foundation, and MinnPost donors directly contributed $6,595 to support local journalism.

The final amount is substantially higher than Brauer thought they would raise and much more than many cynics thought too. Brauer said he thinks they would have raised even more money if it were a do or die situation, but the outcome of this campaign had no impact on the BrauBlog. This campaign could have raised $0 and the Braublog would still be around.

“We raised at least double what I guessed we would,” Brauer said. “I have a death-to-newspapers pal who guessed it wouldn’t raise a grand — some pal! — so on the whole I’m pretty pleased. Would’ve been nice to ring the 10K bell, but that was a somewhat arbitrary figure set by the matching funder.”

Publisher Joel Kramer noted that more than two-thirds of micro-sponsors choose to donate the higher amount, $25, instead of the lower $10 amount:

Some people have suggested that we should not have capped the micro-sponsorship donations at $25.  One of the goals here was to test out a “low price point,” since we encourage our regular members to donate at least $50 a year. It is interesting that more than two-thirds of the micro-sponsors chose the Highbrau level of $25 rather than the Lowbrau level of $10, so maybe some of you would have given more.

It would be interesting to see how a $10, $25 and $50 campaign would do. Or a name-your-own price with a $10 floor.

In case you missed it, yesterday we had a post about Brauer, the BrauBlog, MinnPost, getting people to pay for journalism and more.