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

["Jeff F. T." <nekohayo gmail com>]

Hi all,

You may be familiar with the fact that circa 2010, we ran a successful fundraising campaign to allow the GNOME Foundation to hire a part-time sysadmin (see also http://www.vuntz.net/journal/post/2010/06/02/Hiring-a-sysadmin-for-the-GNOME-infrastructure for a memory refresher).

This has served us well throughout the years: both the reliability and the scope of services offered on the GNOME infrastructure rose a lot since then.

As of 2015, this fund has now been depleted. Personally, I find it rather impressive that we've managed to do so much, for as long as five years, with the money raised back then (around 45k total if we take into account the money contributed through Friends of GNOME during that campaign).

For some time* now, I've had in my mind to prepare some "marketing collateral" (such as a brochure) to prepare a new campaign, seeing this as an opportunity to try bringing in a new set of sponsors this time around, and perhaps raise a bigger amount that would allow us to accomplish more work on our infrastructure.

A while ago I started a draft/braindump on my end, but before I spam you with such a wall of text, I would like to know who would be interested to help with this.

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.
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.
3. Thinking about the perks that sponsors get for various levels (if any?) of sponsorship
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).
6. 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. Thoughts?
7. Going through the wealth of information in https://wiki.gnome.org/Sysadmin/ and digesting that into a compelling pitch. Or, alternatively, just taking the existing draft/plan I had written some time ago and extending (or simplifying!) it.
8. Designing the documents (or website) that would serve as the medium for this message.

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).

We'll need to start pushing for this as soon as possible to ensure the continuity of our infrastructure work. I do think this a pretty interesting marketing project, so I thought I'd share the fun here! ;)

Any takers who would like to help make this happen?

*: In fact, I initially touched upon this subject here during the winter... https://mail.gnome.org/archives/engagement-list/2015-March/msg00019.html