Re: Questions for the candidates: finances

[Emily Gonyer <emilyyrose gmail com>]

In my previous email responding to Kat, I touched on this very
subject. First and foremost we need to determine two things: 1) How
much money we are currently spending on what, and what is truly
needed. 2) How much money is currently coming in, and from where -
this should be broken down into categories - individual donations, and
at least the top 5-10 corporate donors ought to be listed along with
how much they have been and are giving.

Then we should move on to determining how we can raise donations from
individuals and small businesses. Donors should not have to search the
website to figure out how to do so - a small, but prominent link to
'Contribute to GNOME!' would not be out of place on the site.
Currently it takes at least 3 clicks to arrive at a site where you can
donate - and your only choice for doing so is via paypal. Why don't we
accept other payment options? Is it just that nobody has bothered to
set it up? If that is the case, we should be asking for help doing so.
At the very least, we should accept payments from google, facebook and
amazon, and we should at least consider accepting bitcoins as well.

Finally, there are other funding options available online - a quick
search reveals numerous websites with ideas on how to more effectively
raise funds. Utilizing every tool available to us to raise money from
individuals should be our first priority. Only after we have fully
explored these options should we go back to asking for yet more
corporate money.


Emily Gonyer

On Tue, May 20, 2014 at 5:28 AM, oliverp <oliver propst gmail com> wrote:
> On Tue, 2014-05-20 at 10:48 +0200, oliverp wrote:
> > On Mon, 2014-05-19 at 22:02 -0400, Marina Zhurakhinskaya wrote:
> >  I think we can do more with organization sponsorship and individual donations than we are doing right 
> > now. We have a product that is naturally of interest to a lot of consumers and corporate users, and of 
> > interest to hardware and application developers to be compatible with. We also have technology that is of 
> > interest to people to build their own products with or create services around. When it became known that 
> > the GNOME Foundation was in a difficult financial situation, we received an unprecedented number of 
> > individual donations. These were previously untapped donors who are very supportive of GNOME. I think we 
> > should aim to increase how much we get in private donations, and we can do that by reporting to our donors 
> > how their money is being used and having yearly fundraising campaigns. We need to dedicate our fundraising 
> > energy to these two sources because they are complimentary to the goals we have for advancing our 
> > technology. As a Foundation, even with an ED, we have
>  lim
> >  limited resources, so we need to consider how to allocate them most effectively.
> >
> >
> > > I'd like to share a great article about fundraising by the Ada Initiative founders which has informed 
> > > some of my views on it.
> > > http://modelviewculture.com/pieces/the-ada-initiative-founders-on-funding-activism-for-women-in-open-source
> That is a great article thanks for sharing! The Engagement Team have started a discussion [1] about how the 
> Foundation
> can become more effective in the fundraising, and as part of that effort
> set-up a wiki page [2] with some resources on the subject (have added
> the post it to the wiki).
>
> I hope you are interested in joining this effort, the Engagement Team
> want to collaborate closely with the Board in this.
>
> 1https://mail.gnome.org/archives/engagement-list/2014-April/msg00052.html
> 2https://wiki.gnome.org/Engagement/FriendsOfGNOME/HowWeCanImprove
>
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