advisory board fees

[Stormy Peters <stormy gnome org>]

Hi GNOME Marketing Team,

At the Advisory Board meeting at GUADEC we discussed raising advisory board fees. I took the action item to discuss it with this list and to come up with some messaging for existing advisory board members.

I'd welcome any and all feedback on how best to explain and portray this to existing advisory board members.

Some key points:
* Our advisory board fees have been steady for 10 years.
* Inflation, the value of the dollar and the economy have all changed during that time. ($10,000 in 1999 is only $7892 in today's dollars.)
* We increased our staff costs a lot in the past year and that's resulted in a lot of things they said were good - we've seen a lot of activity in the past year.
* In the past year we've accomplished a lot from marketing to co-locating an event with KDE to announcing plans to ship GNOME 3.0.
* Hackfests are one of the key ways we get great things done (and the advisory board members all agree) but depending on them to support all of them turned out to be a bad idea in a downturn. We need to make sure the income we can count on can support key hackfests without additional money.
* We are getting better at doing more with less - we're being more efficient. Take the travel committee for example.
The travel committee is greatly improving the GNOME Foundation's efficiency in sponsoring travel. By organizing lodging as well as approving airfare, they were able to substantially increase the number of people who received travel assistance. For GUADEC 2009 they managed travel assistance for 39 people for $31,838. Compare that

to 36 people for $41,000 in 2008.
* We are raising money in other ways, like Friends of GNOME which has raised $20,000 this year!
* We are signing up new sponsors. Since Stormy started we've signed up 3 new sponsors. We haven't had as much traction as we'd like because of the economy but expect it to pick up again soon.

And we'll be asking for $20,000 instead of $10,000. For this money they'll get two (and maybe three) staff plus a couple of committed hackfests.

Comments? Suggestions?

Stormy