While kind and sometimes famous souls across the country have been showing their faith in media by purchasing subscriptions and sending reporters items like donuts and espresso machines, The New York Times used that enthusiastic feedback to start a student subscription sponsorship program.

Within the first few week or so of the program, launched Feb. 9, the paper had received enough donations to allow it to provide 200,000 students across the country with a digital subscriptions to the Times.

The momentum of that initial enthusiasm has only grown since, and now, at the one-month mark, the paper has received contributions from more than 15,000 donors that bring the total number of students receiving digital subscriptions to 1.3 million.

On the official donation page, would-be donors have the option of giving anywhere from $10 to $2000, but a call or email sent to the program enables others to donate an amount on either side of that range, from donations of $4–which cover the cost of one or two student subscriptions, depending on type–to, in one case, an anonymous donation of $1 million.

And thanks to that very generous boost, the Times is going next-step with the program, adding extras and interactive components like a just-announced series of webinars that will be run by The Learning Network. The series will feature journalists from the Times covering a variety of issues like climate change, immigration and the Supreme Court to an audience comprised of students and educators from the sponsored schools. Also up for discussion: news literacy. We’d like to see that particular seminar reach an even wider audience.