Friends of GNOME Refresh Initiative

Let's make Friends of GNOME great! Some parts of this plan are in progress. Others are in planning stages.

Goals

• Simplify the scheme, particularly the donation levels.
  • There's a feeling that these aren't particularly effective in promoting donations.
  • They have an administrative cost associated with them.
• Make the web pages look nicer and more inviting.
• Increase awareness of the scheme.
• Encourage more people to become donors and increase donor retention.
  • Communicate why the scheme is important, what it achieves.
  • Make donors feel valued.
• Clarify some aspects of the scheme:
  • Explain how LWN subscriptions can be claimed, and that there's a waiting period. (Some donors have written to us confused about whether they should have received something or not.)
  • Give a clue about how long it will take for postcards or gifts to arrive.
  • Communicate that Paypal addresses are used to send gifts, along with instructions for what to do if gifts shouldn't be sent to the Paypal address.
  • Communicate that gifts are sent out after donating for a year (if we want to keep this behavior and/or keep gifts).
  • Communicate that the name on the Paypal account will be used for the members page.
• Clarify Friends of GNOME as a membership scheme for regular donors.
  • One time donations and fund raising campaigns have been conducted under the Friends of GNOME banner in the past, but this dilutes its meaning and purpose.
• Make it possible for non-English speakers to donate?

In Progress

Refresh tasks that are in progress.

Website Redesign

The Friends of GNOME web pages are being redesigned - discussion about this can be found on the Engagement Team mailing list.

• First generation mockups

• Second generation mockups

• Third generation mockups

Design features (these are all potential discussion points):

• Instead of predefined subscription levels, there's a box where the donor can specify the amount.
• Postcards are included in the new designs, but stickers and t-shirts are deliberately absent.
• The questionnaire at the end would require that we set up infrastructure to record the answers and produce reports and so on. If we don't have that, we could skip the questionnaire page for now (it would be nice though).
• A questionnaire asks questions after someone has donated.

Outstanding design tasks:

• All the images were picked in a hurry. Some probably aren't correct so we will need to find better ones.
• Design badges for donors to put on their blogs/websites.
• Details on employee matching need expanding - list of companies.
• Add annual subscription?
• Questionnaire: needs a privacy policy; questions need review; needs proper design!
• Add email templates to make sure our messaging is coherent.

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 Friends to GUADEC / GNOME.Asia.
• Send a thank you email from everyone who was sponsored to attend GUADEC.
• Send them release announcements (along with a thank you for helping us to make the release great).
• Happy new year
• Other ideas:
  • Newsletters
  • Thank you emails on anniversaries of becoming a Friend of GNOME

Actions:

• Can we create an HTML email template that we can send out.

  • According to TobiasMueller there are technical challenges with sending out HTML mail. Need to investigate this.

  • Email design page

• Planning:
  • Decide which messages we will send to donors, and how frequent they will be. Create a schedule.
  • Figure out who will be responsible. Put checks in place to make sure it happens.

Improve Organization

General goals in this section:

• Try to include more people in the administration of the scheme.
• Document processes.
• Put feedback mechanisms in place so we can evaluate our performance.

Outstanding questions:

• friends@gnome.org is swamped by spam (primarily Japanese, curiously). - FIXED

• Would it be possible to generate monthly reports on Friends of GNOME membership? At a minimum these would say how many people have joined and left, and the amounts involved. Other things they could say:
  • Summarise failed payments.
  • Summarise total number of donors and donation amounts.
• Would it be possible to generate a report on the state of Friends of GNOME? This would include:
  • Information on joining/leaving donors over time.
  • A breakdown of current donors: when they joined, how much they contribute.
• What kind of infrastructure would be required to record answers to questionnaires, and potentially generate reports on the answers?

Next Steps

Aspects of the refresh initiative that can follow on.

Media Planning

Create a media plan for Friends of GNOME. This should include a schedule for posts about the scheme. Ideas for posts:

• 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 ideas?

Marketing Materials

We need a consistently designed set of marketing materials for Friends of GNOME. This should include:

• Flyers or leaflets that can be distributed at events (GUADEC, FOSDEM, and so on).
• Website badges.

It might be good to have a Friends of GNOME logo that can be used for all of these materials.