Oliver Propst <oliver.pro...@gmail.com> wrote: > When we are doing a campaign we tend to be very focused on it (thus > busy), and not have the resources to focus on more long term planning. > > Thus its a a good time for us now to think about how we can improve > our fundraising efforts [1]. A great start is to learn how from how > other free/open source projects have conducted their fundraising > campings. ...
Thanks for getting this started, Oliver. I've been thinking about this a bit myself recently, and I'd like to do some work on Friends of GNOME if I can find the time. I wanted to discuss it in a team meeting, but the mailing list works. So, some general thoughts: * One of my main issues with Friends of GNOME right now is that we don't do enough to engage with existing donors. If people donate, the least they should get back is regular updates about how we are spending their money. Right now, Friends of GNOME is a black hole - people make their donations and that's pretty much it. This is not an effective way to encourage people to keep donating or to get them to donate more (see below). One obvious thing we should be doing is sending regular updates to donors, probably as an email (I wonder if this could be tied in with the annual report somehow - eg. quarterly donor updates could be used as the basis for each annual report). * We ought to be looking to existing donors as the potential source of additional cash. If someone is making a regular donation, the chances are that they will also be willing to donate to periodic fund raising campaigns. This is the way a lot of charities operate - once you are a donor they will contact you about their campaigns. One thing we need to do here is separate Friends of GNOME and our fund raising campaigns into different entities. * It doesn't seem like the adopt a hacker postcards and the t-shirts are being tracked and distributed very effectively, and I'm not convinced that we have the administrative capacity to do a good job of these. I wonder if we should drop them in favour of other incentives that don't have the same administrative burden. Ideas: discount vouchers, vouchers to spend on GNOME merchandise, freebies at conferences, membership badges you can download and print at home. * It's time to be thinking about another campaign. When that happens, we need to be certain that we will be able to use the money fairly quickly - this hasn't happened in the past, and that is potentially damaging. (Again, people need feedback about how their money is being spent, otherwise they might not donate again.) We should think about what we actually need money for, and I'd like the board to provide us with some advice here. There are outstanding sysadmin tasks, for example, like upgrading Bugzilla, or maybe we need to improve our infrastructure in some way. * Aside from the funding campaigns, we don't actively promote or publicise Friends of GNOME. This is a basic error - we should be routinely inviting people to join, posting about the scheme, and advertising what we are doing with donations. This should be part of the Engagement Team's regular activities - not just when we happen to have a campaign running. A good way to start here would be to come up with a plan for what kinds of posts we should be making and how often we should be making them; this is something we can check ourselves against at each team meeting. * It seems to me that the Foundation's money goes into a central pot - I don't get the impression that particular income is earmarked for specific uses. I wonder if the finances could/should be organised in such a way that we can definitely say where Friends of GNOME money is going, or even channel it to areas that we think are more interesting to donors. Again, that's something for the board. * Finally, we need data about our existing donors. There needs to be a system where we have email and postal addresses so we can contact them. We need to know how much they donate and how long they have been members for. We need to know how many people are joining/leaving over time. We need to know why people are joining/leaving. This will require new infrastructure, and we need advice from the board about what is technically required and how we can get it. Sorry for the long post! Allan _______________________________________________ engagement-list mailing list engagement-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/engagement-list
