In my previous email responding to Kat, I touched on this very subject. First and foremost we need to determine two things: 1) How much money we are currently spending on what, and what is truly needed. 2) How much money is currently coming in, and from where - this should be broken down into categories - individual donations, and at least the top 5-10 corporate donors ought to be listed along with how much they have been and are giving.
Then we should move on to determining how we can raise donations from individuals and small businesses. Donors should not have to search the website to figure out how to do so - a small, but prominent link to 'Contribute to GNOME!' would not be out of place on the site. Currently it takes at least 3 clicks to arrive at a site where you can donate - and your only choice for doing so is via paypal. Why don't we accept other payment options? Is it just that nobody has bothered to set it up? If that is the case, we should be asking for help doing so. At the very least, we should accept payments from google, facebook and amazon, and we should at least consider accepting bitcoins as well. Finally, there are other funding options available online - a quick search reveals numerous websites with ideas on how to more effectively raise funds. Utilizing every tool available to us to raise money from individuals should be our first priority. Only after we have fully explored these options should we go back to asking for yet more corporate money. Emily Gonyer On Tue, May 20, 2014 at 5:28 AM, oliverp <oliver.pro...@gmail.com> wrote: > On Tue, 2014-05-20 at 10:48 +0200, oliverp wrote: >> On Mon, 2014-05-19 at 22:02 -0400, Marina Zhurakhinskaya wrote: >> I think we can do more with organization sponsorship and individual >> donations than we are doing right now. We have a product that is naturally >> of interest to a lot of consumers and corporate users, and of interest to >> hardware and application developers to be compatible with. We also have >> technology that is of interest to people to build their own products with or >> create services around. When it became known that the GNOME Foundation was >> in a difficult financial situation, we received an unprecedented number of >> individual donations. These were previously untapped donors who are very >> supportive of GNOME. I think we should aim to increase how much we get in >> private donations, and we can do that by reporting to our donors how their >> money is being used and having yearly fundraising campaigns. We need to >> dedicate our fundraising energy to these two sources because they are >> complimentary to the goals we have for advancing our technology. As a >> Foundation, even with an ED, we have > lim >> limited resources, so we need to consider how to allocate them most >> effectively. >> >> >> > I'd like to share a great article about fundraising by the Ada Initiative >> > founders which has informed some of my views on it. >> > http://modelviewculture.com/pieces/the-ada-initiative-founders-on-funding-activism-for-women-in-open-source > That is a great article thanks for sharing! The Engagement Team have started > a discussion [1] about how the Foundation > can become more effective in the fundraising, and as part of that effort > set-up a wiki page [2] with some resources on the subject (have added > the post it to the wiki). > > I hope you are interested in joining this effort, the Engagement Team > want to collaborate closely with the Board in this. > > 1https://mail.gnome.org/archives/engagement-list/2014-April/msg00052.html > 2https://wiki.gnome.org/Engagement/FriendsOfGNOME/HowWeCanImprove > > _______________________________________________ > foundation-list mailing list > foundation-list@gnome.org > https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list -- Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it. - Goethe Be who you are and say what you feel because those who mind don't matter and those who matter don't mind. - Dr.Seuss Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted. - Albert Einstein _______________________________________________ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
