Re: Questions for the candidates: finances

[Sriram Ramkrishna <sri ramkrishna me>]

Hiya Jim!


On Mon, May 19, 2014 at 11:19 AM, Jim Nelson <jim yorba org> wrote:
> Hello everyone,
> Aside from corporate sponsorship and personal donations, what area(s) would
> you investigate to increase and stabilize GNOME's finances?  (Or do you feel
> these two methods are the only or best way to achieve this goal?)

Corporate sponsorship tends to bring in a lot of money in and it is
always beneficial to be able to increase that.  If you wanted to do
grass roots based fundraising, that would require setting up a better
donation system than we have now.  We can definitely do better, and
the board has had some discussions about alternative systems last
year.

Some people have suggested using flattr or some other method of
micro-payments that could bring in revenue.  I think I threw out
something about tying donations to bug fixes.  You could setup
marketing calls to various companies who might be using our stack and
ask for donations that way for smaller amounts like 1000 dollars or
5000 dollars.

In general, they do okay, but they won't be very large.  You need to
grow the audience to really take advantage of that strategy.

Another idea might be to take advantage of funding opportunities like
grants from the government or companies.  We don't necessarily have to
make a technology argument, we could focus on programs like OPW or our
underlying philosophy of freedom.  We are after all a philanthropic
organization, we could make that argument.  Here is a grant
application from JP Morgan as an example:

http://www.jpmorganchase.com/corporate/Corporate-Responsibility/grant-programs

Of course this one is corporate, but I'm sure we can find others.

Another idea is to fundraise at conferences, and not necessarily our
tech ones.  Most of fundraising is about making 1:1 connections and
then making a compelling argument.

sri



> -- Jim
>
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