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

[Cosimo Cecchi <cosimo cecchi gmail com>]

Hey Jeff,

Thanks for taking the lead on this, and apologies for the delay! Replying to this has been on my list for a long time.

Please find some notes below.

On Sun, 2015-11-08 at 00:07 -0500, Jeff F. T. wrote:

Globally, this project will involve:

1. 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.

In my opinion, asking for a specific amount of money almost always works better than asking for an unbounded amount.

Of course I agree that the more we get, the better it is; perhaps a good way to formulate this would be to borrow from crowdfunding and use the concept of "stretch goal"?

Not sure if it really applies to a field that's almost by design in "response mode" like sysadmin though.

Relatedly, do you/Andrea see the sysadmin work (and expenses) increasing or decreasing in the medium term?

Are there any medium or large projects that we would do if we had funds or resources?

2. 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.

That's certainly interesting; what angle are you planning to use to approach such companies?

I know that some existing sponsors of the project e.g. support us because of our focus on user privacy.

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

It's my perception that the kind of work that typically falls under this sort of budget is fairly unglamorous, and not easily perk-able (is that a word?).

What kind of things did you have in mind?

4. 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...

5. 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).

I think these two questions are pretty much related. If we expect to get a few large donations from enterprise supporters, the brochure would probably work better, while if we want people to be able to contribute small donations, it might be worth considering alternative models.

Personally, I would tend to lean towards fewer large donors for this, as they're more likely to understand the importance of having funds available, with less needs to promise something in return or justify the expenses.

I think once we start answering a couple of the initial questions above I should be able to complete my notes/draft and turn that into a wiki page for review (or we could have a collaborative editing session with etherpad if you prefer).

Let me know what you think, hope this helps!

Thanks,

Cosimo