Re: Boosting Friends of GNOME in 2008

[Behdad Esfahbod <behdad behdad org>]

On Mon, 2008-05-05 at 19:14 +0200, Dave Neary wrote:
> 
> Do we have a list of places where money is needed, with an idea of how
> much we need?

Not really...  We know for example that our website infrastructure is
lagging, but we are relying on overworked community members to fix it.
If we had the resources for driving the task and raise money for it, we
could pay someone to do it.

All of this may become much more realistic if and when we get that
foundation bizdev.


> My main point was that we need to fundraise for stuff, but fundraising
> for salary is in general a hard sell. You need to fundraise for the
> benefits of what the salary will get you. And the more concrete you
> can
> make the benefit, the better.
> 
> I just thought of a great waty of doing this.
> 
> Let's say you want to hire a sysadmin. You want him to Do Stuff.
> 
> Say you draw up a rough job description, with a list of 10 things you
> want him to do (10% of time: ensure email infrastructure is running
> smoothly, 10% of time: maintenance of VCS, 10% of time: processing new
> account requests, whatever, I haven't really thought about this).
> 
> You then make a dollar value for each one - "we need $8,000 to keep
> our
> email going this year" - bang! a good package to fundraise against.
> "Just $10,000 to handle membership request backlog!" OK - harder to
> sell.
> 
> But you get the idea. You split the salary of the sysadmin across the
> things he'll do, and you can tell straight away what people are
> interested in, and what they're not. And if there's no funds coming in
> against the "keep DNS running smoothly" package, you can run a
> campaign
> against that, highlighting the problems we've had with DNS in the
> past.

Yep.  Definitely something the bizdev person can work with the community
to drive.  Thanks for the ideas.


> OK, it's not sexy, but you can maybe send donors a picture of a bind
> process running somewhere? ;)
> 
> Cheers,
> Dave.
> 
-- 
behdad
http://behdad.org/

"Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little
 Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."
        -- Benjamin Franklin, 1759