I have resisted the urge of promoting my blog for many months, but this is literally (per my analysis) for the best cause.
We have also raised a decent amount of money so far, so at least some people were convinced by the arguments and didn't stop at the cute hedgehog pictures.
I agree with less words but less pictures is more of a stylistic questions. Also preferences differ here a lot. Many Medium articles use pictures between sections for example. Less links? Come on. Maybe less underlining but we live in the age of hypertext. They should be relevant though.
Did you see the links in OP's post? As I clarified, links take readers away from a page. Who knows whether they will then become distracted by a link on that new page, etc., etc., and then you lose readers unnecessarily. Links should be purposeful, meant to verify data/claims.
Pictures, like links, should center around the main purpose of the post but again, purposefully. The pic from Elf, for example, added nothing to the post (that's not even a quote from the movie) and said something we already know: OP wants us to donate. No new information. I said some... (read more)