Re: Friends of GNOME goals (& IRC meeting)

[Stormy Peters <stormy gnome org>]

On Tue, Jan 5, 2010 at 11:15 AM, Joe 'Zonker' Brockmeier <jzb zonker net> wrote:

First observation, this page needs to be updated: http://www.gnome.org/friends/

Says 2008, obviously we're looking at 2009 donations now. (Sidebar)

Jaap, can you help us?

We're asking people to give $10 or more per month. What's the
incentive? (Aside from supporting GNOME, of course -- but this is like
public television, everybody assumes someone else will donate.)

What should we give at the different levels?

Also, one of the problems we have is that we don't want a gazillion options ... or at least not all on the same page.

Can we do different tshirts with different levels of recognition? Or should we give out polo shirts or different types of goods at the different levels?

A comparable program would be the Electronic Frontier Foundation. They
do a pretty good job of 1) telling people what they support with
newsletters, campaigns, etc. and 2) they give swag yearly. I see
there's a t-shirt but maybe that's not very compelling for $120 (or
more) a year.

We talked about having people optin to a newsletter. We still need to add that option to the web page. What do people think about adding a "Do you want to sign up for our newsletter?" option?

We can now track and send out emails through CiviCRM so it'll be relatively easy to keep track of.

What could we put in place that would encourage people to not only
sign up, but also try to persuade others? Is there any way to have a 

referral code? Extra recognition for people who bring in more people?

This is a great idea.

FSF is offering travel sponsorship as a reward for people that recruit the most donations.  We could offer travel money to a conference of their choice, recognition on gnome.org or gnome.org/friends, ...

If we move our Friends of GNOME sign up page from its current system to CiviCRM, it's easy for people to set up goals for themselves and track who brings in what. (At least it's supposed to be easy. :)

But moving to CiviCRM would probably require Jaap and the art team's help.

Given GNOME's user base, it should be possible to bring in more than
10 people per month.

Agreed. And I think right now we are mostly talking to our developers, not our end users. Yet most of our Friends (95%) are users not developers.

Another consideration: Some people might feel nickle and dimed. Not by
GNOME specifically, but it seems like everybody has a hand out. If I
donated at the $10 a month level to all the organizations I "support"
I'd probably be looking at $50 - $100 per month.

Any way to "bundle" this with other orgs/related businesses?

An example: What about doing a revenue share with Linux Weekly News
and giving each person a membership to LWN + FoG? Or a triple play
with the Linux Foundation?

LWN was willing. I talked to them and we had a thread going on the mailing list.

We talked about how it could be an incentive for higher sponsorship too. $10/month is the regular, $12/month includes LWN.

What do you think? (Thanks for all the ideas!)

Stormy