Re: How we can improve our fundraising efforts

[Allan Day <allanpday gmail com>]

Oliver Propst <oliver propst 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