How we Can Improve our Fundraising Efforts

Ideas for improving the Engagement Team's fundraising activities.

Ways to Improve

Engage with Existing Donors

It's important that we show donors that we care, and make an effort to include them. Things we can do here:

Invite them to social events in their area.
Invite them to GUADEC, GNOME.Asia and Boston Summit?
Send news emails, which simultaneously thank them for their ongoing support.
- This could be a news digest of things that have happened in the project.
- It could be edited version of the annual report?
- Sending announcements of new releases is probably easiest and good.

To do: we need a pretty HTML template for emails, that can include photos and pictures.

News and Social Media

We should advertise Friends of GNOME on social media. This would include regular posts that:

Advertise acheivements, such as events hosted thanks to donations, etc. For example, could do summary posts: "Thanks to Friends of GNOME, we have sponsored XX contributors to attend XX events in the past 12 months."
Generally advertises the existence of the program and invites people to join.

Other Improvements

Investigate how existing donors could serve as an potential source of additional revenue.
Collect data about donations and donors, so we can evaluate our activities.
Design and print flyers to have at GUADEC, FOSDEM, and so on.
Fund raising campaigns - we used to do specific fund raising campaigns on a regular basis. We should do these again.
Can the Foundation Board communicate more with the public about about their activities?

Ideas

Research

Research on how other free/open source organizations have conducted fundraising.

Ada Initiative

http://modelviewculture.com/pieces/the-ada-initiative-founders-on-funding-activism-for-women-in-open-source

GNU MediaGoblin

The GNU MediaGoblin project recently run a successful campaign (its interesting to note that this project only have one time full employee).

http://mediagoblin.org/news/mediagoblin-campaign-2014.html

http://mediagoblin.org/news/last-day-of-campaign-second-milestone-in.html

http://mediagoblin.org/news/almost-there.html

http://mediagoblin.org/news/passed-first-milestone-and-10k-matching.html

http://mediagoblin.org/news/do-something-about-censorship.html

http://mediagoblin.org/news/help-spread-the-campaign.html

http://mediagoblin.org/news/financial-transparency.html

Observations

A lot of time planning went into the campaign
Was clear from the beginning of what the founds was going to be used for, with a set of tangible goals.
Emphasize the importance of the campaign for the project
Made the campaign very visible on the homepage
Had a clear end date for the campaign (but allowed people donate after this date)
Had a campaign video. (GNOME 3 release videos cited as an source of inspiration)
Provide continuously updates about the progress of the campaign and communicated very clearly.
Was very transparent with how the founds was going to be used, provided a detailed breakdown on how the founds are going to used.
(Christopher Webber from MediaGoblin have contributed with insights).

Mozilla

Mozilla had a series of blogposts that focused on how to run a fundraisier in free/open source software setting (mostly based on the 2013 year end campaign), lots of good stuff here!

https://fundraising.mozilla.org/why-fundraising-matters/

https://fundraising.mozilla.org/strategy-part-i-the-revenue-is-the-model/

https://fundraising.mozilla.org/strategy-part-iii-extending-the-product-metaphor/

https://fundraising.mozilla.org/

https://fundraising.mozilla.org/campaign-overview/

http://www.tiki-toki.com/timeline/entry/156777/Mozilla-2013-Year-End-Campaign#vars!date=2014-01-05_17:11:02!

https://fundraising.mozilla.org/who-gave-mozilla-203000/

https://fundraising.mozilla.org/whats-the-highest-average-gift-by-channel/

https://fundraising.mozilla.org/geeking-out-on-the-snippet/

https://fundraising.mozilla.org/join-mozillas-thunderclap/

https://fundraising.mozilla.org/rethinking-small-dollar-fundraising/

https://fundraising.mozilla.org/one-weird-trick-for-more-donations-from-your-homepage/