Clay Johnson & Fundraising

[Stormy Peters <stormy gnome org>]

Marketing folks,

I had an interesting conversation with Clay Johnson from the Sunlight Labs. He helped with a lot of the online, social networking work with the Dean presidential campaign.

He had a couple of interesting ideas and points. I asked him if he'd be willing to do a blog interview but in the meantime here are a couple I think are relevant to this group:

1) He suggested we do a campaign like a carbon tax. So we target users for our fundraising and encourage them to give to free software as a way of contributing. A way of paying for what they use. Like people/companies pay a carbon tax for the amount of pollution they put out. People that contribute to GNOME would get some sort of "carbon credit" or "code credit" and would help alleviate the guilt of not contributing.

2) He suggested we'd be much more successful if we let people support projects or features that they cared about. So instead of adopt a hacker, more of an adopt a project. I think we could easily do this with projects that would like to have a hackfest. Instead of showing hackers, we could show projects. (And one option would be a general bucket "pick the project that needs the most support" bucket.) We could try this for a while and see how it works. (This is like the adopt a line of code that we saw from another project too.)

3) He said he never, ever, ever lets his fundraisers ask his developers for money. He says developers give time that is worth a lot of money and he doesn't want to annoy them asking them for money. He also said volunteers rarely donate. Since most of our donations come from users, I think this makes a lot of sense. We need to figure out how to reach out to our end users more and our developers less.

4) Random fundraising tidbit: If you sign a petition, you are much more likely to donate if asked for money within the next week. At some point we could ask people to sign a page supporting GNOME, kind of like a Friends of GNOME page but with explicit support for our mission. Then we could do a big fundraiser right afterwards. (Feels a bit sneaky. :)

Thoughts?

Stormy