Re: How we can improve our fundraising efforts

[Tobias Mueller <muelli cryptobitch de>]

Hi everyone.

On Fri, Apr 25, 2014 at 11:15:25AM +0100, Allan Day wrote:
> > I like the idea of a newsletter - the main thing is that we actually commit
> > to write something on a regular basis. Given how hard it was to get
> > quarterly reports together I think this is non-trivial.
>
> Yes it's a challenge, but I really do think that it is essential. It's
> really not cool to accept money from people and not keep them
> informed.
>
> I would at least like to have the conversation about how we can make
> this happen, before we discard the possibility. We should look into
> ways that we can be clever about generating the required content. For
> example, we could:
>
>  * Recycle material that we generate for news posts. eg. When we write
> news posts about events, fundraising campaigns or releases, we could
> repurpose the same copy for the newsletter, or generate emails from
> them directly. "eg. GNOME 3.12 released today: thanks for helping!",
> "Greetings from GUADEC", etc.
We should do that.

>  * Recycle the copy from blog posts about events (from those who have
> been sponsored).
I was trying to do that for the GNOME.Asia 2013 report for the Annual Report.
Max assembled a "press coverage" report after the summit which really helped to
locate the posts people produced. I haven't seen that for other events so
recycling that material either needs thorough searching later or
someone attentative to compile such a press coverage report.
Anyway, the posts I found were not overly useful for the Annual Report.

>  * Automatically sends emails to donors on the anniversary that they
> started to donate. Maybe these could have a link to a page with
> information about what we've been doing with the money.
That's a very good idea. The infrastructure for handling the Paypal
stuff is here: http://hg.cryptobitch.de/gnome-paypal
It's certainly possible to add something to fire a mail after a year.
Bear in mind that the infrastructure is not considered to be a final
solution. But as it's seems to work reasonably well there is neither 
an efforts nor an incentive to change. It'd be good though.

Feel free draft an email and pass it on to me.

>  * Use the annual reports as a way to generate the copy. Each time we
> write the report, we can have an article about Friends of GNOME which
> can get turned into a newsletter.
That'd be great. We can also start with by sending the Annual Report
to our donors. In fact, I have it on my agenda to write to all donors
of the last 12 months and invite them to GUADEC.

>  * Automatically contact donors if their direct debits stop coming in,
> in some way. It could be a mistake or, if it is deliberate, we need to
> find out why.
That's being done, cf. http://hg.cryptobitch.de/gnome-paypal/file/3902464c0296/cancelmail.txt
I appreciate being sent improvements to the texts we send to our donors.

> > Also, I
> > think maybe just keeping people posted about the plans would help. We don't
> > really have an informal way to communicate officially. The closest we have
> > is the GNOME Twitter feed, I guess, but there's nothing on the website where
> > we can post small updates and musings, etc.
>
> I'd like to make gnome.org/news more informal - the main thing it
> needs is to expose peoples' user accounts, so they can post as
> themselves.
Hm, that's currently possible and encouraged, no?

> We also need to encourage the Board of Directors to post
> more about what they are doing. It's a shame that we the board doesn't
> have a public face like this.
Absolutely correct.  I can only speak for myself and I don't particularly
like the idea of me writing about the things I do, partly because I think
that the governancy stuff isn't really attractive to the bigger part of the
people and partly because I feel that it benefits GNOME more if I spend my
time actually doing things than writing about it.  Also, I don't like the
writing part so much ;-)
But, that can be addressed.  We could, for example, do interviews with
people who are willing to do the writing.  Or we could try to have more
meaningful minutes of the Board meetings.  Or we could have a "News from
the Board" agenda item for the Marketing meetings.
At the end of the day someone actually needs to do the work.  As you've
exemplified with the Quarterly Report example it can be non-trivial to
sustain that effort beyond a short term.

> OK, it would be good to have a conversation about that. I wonder if
> Tobi could join us for a meeting some time, or maybe I'll just ask him
> when I see him next. :)
I do try every time, but it usually doesn't work out for me.

> We also need to figure out a good way for the Engagement Team to get
> access to the data when it is generated.
Yes.  For last GUADEC I was calling for people who are interested in the
FoG program to meet up.  Most of the people who were present at that time
have access (to most of the data).  I think we need to be a bit more secretive
about the data than I usually like to be as we handle personal data such as
addresses of our donors.


Cheers,
  Tobi