Re: Kicking off some questions for the 2015 sysadmin sponsorship brochure (or fundraising campaign)

[Allan Day <allanpday gmail com>]

Jeff F. T. <nekohayo gmail com> wrote:
...
> Globally, this project will involve:
>
> Thinking about the amount of money we want to aim for, what we'll achieve
> with it. To give you a rough idea, the work done with our part-time sysadmin
> (Andrea), over the past two years, costs an average of 1200 USD per month
> (roughly). In my view we ought to try to raise as much money as we can for
> this, and if we do raise significantly more than last round's 45K, it might
> mean we can assign additional resources or that we can keep going for
> longer.

I think it's important to be realistic with the goal amount - it
wouldn't look great if we fall really short. The previous fund raising
campaign happened in a different era, and I remember that the Friends
of GNOME aspect of it - which Stormy and the then marketing team put a
lot of work into - was one of the most successful ever run.

> Figuring out who our target audience and sponsors would be. Besides the
> traditional prospects in our circles, I was thinking this can be a nice
> opportunity to involve cloud/hosting companies and get them closer to GNOME
> that way. We'll need contacts in those organizations for that to work,
> though.

It doesn't have to be hosting companies: it could be others in the
server/sysadmin space. Think Vagrant, Puppet Labs, Nagios, and so on.

> Thinking about the perks that sponsors get for various levels (if any?) of
> sponsorship

The obvious thing would be positive marketing, through social media
and the website. Or maybe Andrea could get tattoos of the company
logos? :)

Can't think of much else.

> Considering whether a traditional brochure-style print/PDF document is the
> way to go, or if it should be some sort of dynamic crowdfunding-style
> micro-site, or...

Agree with the previous comment - it depends on who is targeted.

> Whether we take the "one big fundraiser every few years" approach, or if we
> do some sort of annual/recurrent "subscription" supporter model. I'm under
> the impression the monolithic fundraising approach is easier and better (not
> sure we want to be hunting for funds all the time for this particular
> aspect).

Again I think it depends on who the target is. If we get sponsorship
from companies that wouldn't usually support GNOME, then a
subscription model would make sense. Otherwise, a campaign with one
time donations would allow us to cast a wider net.

A word of caution though: I wonder whether it is wise to introduce an
additional sponsorship stream at a time when there is pressure on the
channels we already have (advisory board fees and conference
sponsorship).

> What our timeframe should be. This has been an "ASAP" item for a while but
> we need a deadline here. Unfortunately it's quite late as corporate budgets
> are being set as we speak (end of year 2015), though there is the
> non-negligible opportunity of leveraging year-end donations by individuals.
...

I don't have much insight here, I'm afraid. What are the best times of
year to ask for money? We need to take other funding drives into
account here.

Allan