Help fund our live fact-checking of the 2015 State of the Union

PolitiFact launched its first-ever Kickstarter campaign New Year’s Eve to raise $15,000 to live fact-check and annotate the 2015 State of the Union address and GOP response.

We're in our final week, and we're very close our goal. We’ve raised more than $14,000 from more than 550 backers.

To those who contributed and helped spread the word -- thanks!

But we have more work to do. To receive any funds from Kickstarter, we must meet our $15,000 goal on Jan. 20. So if you haven’t contributed yet, please consider making a donation.

SUPPORT POLITIFACT'S KICKSTARTER TO LIVE FACT-CHECK
THE 2015 STATE OF THE UNION AND GOP RESPONSE.

The money is helping fund the staff and technology costs for two new projects we want to launch on State of the Union night.

First, we want provide real-time fact-checking and analysis of the speeches made by President Barack Obama and his GOP counterpart. Using a program called ScribbleLive, our team of 10 fact-checkers will bring you the video and text of both addresses, interspersed with our fact-checks and analysis.

How can we fact-check the State of the Union in real time?

The answer is because we have a database of nearly 10,000 fact-checks, touching on the economy, health care, terrorism and everything else. We can use that previous work to address the points Obama and his GOP counterpart make. We've done this long enough (more than seven years) to know that talking points are often repeated. And if the lines aren't exactly the same, the sentiments are.

Point being: We aren't going to make rash decisions or hasty judgments on comments that are new or unfamiliar to us. In those cases, we'll seek to provide you additional information -- but not necessarily a ruling on our Truth-O-Meter.

Second, once the speeches are over the staff will spend the night annotating both addresses using the annotation platform Genius. We’ll deliver that by 5 a.m. Wednesday, Jan. 21.

You can learn more about the campaign, the rewards you can get or make a contribution by clicking here.