Re: Boosting Friends of GNOME in 2008
Hi Lucas, Coming back to this to get it off my TODO list :) Lucas Rocha wrote: Here are the current ideas: 1. Update the mug design Doing this already. 2. Update the mug design Not sure about this one yet but, again, the idea is to have a brand new donation gift t-shirt with the equation as well. Same t-shirt that was distributed during FOSDEM this year which made a lot of success. Hmmm... these two look similar ;) 3. Prepare a program for long-term donors The idea is to provide ways to easily make monthly donations. We'll provide ways for donating 5, 10, 20 or 50 per month (this might change but that's the general idea) through Paypal. If you're doing recurrent, regular donations, then it might be an idea to use direct debits rather than going through paypal, whose fee structure takes a hefty percentage out of a $5 donation. The donor would receive the benefit after the last payment. In other words: - If a person donates 5, 10, or 20 per month, he/she would get a mug - If a person donates 50 per month, he/she would get a t-shirt I've said this in the past, but it bears repeating. The gifts are nice, but I think that people don't give for the gifts. I'd do my best not to make it seem mercantile if you're doing a subscription model. 4. Promoting Friends of GNOME After we have everything setup (mugs, t-shirts and long-term donation program), make a nice campaign to get short-term and long-term donors. The equation (in the mug and t-shirt) would be the moto for this campaign. Comments? More ideas? Yes, actually! We have a database of all donors to the GNOME project for the past 5 years. We should: * Send them an email at every release pointing to the release notes * Send them a quarterly/biannual newsletter of the foundation's activities (a text-only email will do) * Solicit donations for specific programs when the need arises * Inform them about the subscription options Every donor who has ever made a donation over a certain size (say $500) should receive a printed annual report or the condensed glossy 4-page report every year. Think Médecins Sans Frontières, or political parties, for ideas of how they engage their donors. We should also regularly have targeted fundraising. Raise $10,000 to replace server X! (chances are someone will step in and offer us a server) Raise $10,000 to support hackfest Y! Raise $25,000 in our annual end-of-year fundraising drive! Again, think of how aid organisations match donations up to how it's being spent - sponsor a child, get a photo every year of the school you've donated to, buy a zebu that will get loaned to a poor Sahel farming family, etc... How about an adopt a hacker programme? Get annual photos, reports from conferences they attend thanks to your donations, things like that (OK, I'm gone into brainstorming territory here). It'll come down to a couple of questions: what do we need money for? What will we do with them when the funds start coming in? In particular, you need to think of a very novel way to present the costs of a sysadmin, if you want to raise funds against it. And I think adopting a hard drive or motherboard or somesuch might actually get you some of the way there. Cheers, Dave. -- Dave Neary GNOME Foundation member [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- marketing-list mailing list marketing-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/marketing-list
Re: Boosting Friends of GNOME in 2008
On Mon, 2008-05-05 at 15:48 +0200, Dave Neary wrote: * Send them an email at every release pointing to the release notes * Send them a quarterly/biannual newsletter of the foundation's activities (a text-only email will do) * Solicit donations for specific programs when the need arises * Inform them about the subscription options A one-time mass mail is fine, but for anything even annual, please make sure they either opt in or that it's clear that by their act of donation they will be receiving these, and with clear opt-out instructions. As for the rest of your mail, I agree that one of our main problems is that we don't have resources to spend money where it's needed. -- behdad http://behdad.org/ Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety. -- Benjamin Franklin, 1759 -- marketing-list mailing list marketing-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/marketing-list
Re: Boosting Friends of GNOME in 2008
Hi, Behdad Esfahbod wrote: On Mon, 2008-05-05 at 15:48 +0200, Dave Neary wrote: * Send them an email at every release pointing to the release notes * Send them a quarterly/biannual newsletter of the foundation's activities (a text-only email will do) * Solicit donations for specific programs when the need arises * Inform them about the subscription options A one-time mass mail is fine, but for anything even annual, please make sure they either opt in or that it's clear that by their act of donation they will be receiving these, and with clear opt-out instructions. Absolutely - the first mail sent to all previous donors should ask for a reply from anyone who doesn't want to receive about 6 emails a year from the project. It should be personal enough in tone that no-one could think it was machine-generated spam which we will use to farm email addresses. As for the rest of your mail, I agree that one of our main problems is that we don't have resources to spend money where it's needed. Do we have a list of places where money is needed, with an idea of how much we need? My main point was that we need to fundraise for stuff, but fundraising for salary is in general a hard sell. You need to fundraise for the benefits of what the salary will get you. And the more concrete you can make the benefit, the better. I just thought of a great waty of doing this. Let's say you want to hire a sysadmin. You want him to Do Stuff. Say you draw up a rough job description, with a list of 10 things you want him to do (10% of time: ensure email infrastructure is running smoothly, 10% of time: maintenance of VCS, 10% of time: processing new account requests, whatever, I haven't really thought about this). You then make a dollar value for each one - we need $8,000 to keep our email going this year - bang! a good package to fundraise against. Just $10,000 to handle membership request backlog! OK - harder to sell. But you get the idea. You split the salary of the sysadmin across the things he'll do, and you can tell straight away what people are interested in, and what they're not. And if there's no funds coming in against the keep DNS running smoothly package, you can run a campaign against that, highlighting the problems we've had with DNS in the past. OK, it's not sexy, but you can maybe send donors a picture of a bind process running somewhere? ;) Cheers, Dave. -- Dave Neary GNOME Foundation member [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- marketing-list mailing list marketing-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/marketing-list
Re: Boosting Friends of GNOME in 2008
On Mon, 2008-05-05 at 19:14 +0200, Dave Neary wrote: Do we have a list of places where money is needed, with an idea of how much we need? Not really... We know for example that our website infrastructure is lagging, but we are relying on overworked community members to fix it. If we had the resources for driving the task and raise money for it, we could pay someone to do it. All of this may become much more realistic if and when we get that foundation bizdev. My main point was that we need to fundraise for stuff, but fundraising for salary is in general a hard sell. You need to fundraise for the benefits of what the salary will get you. And the more concrete you can make the benefit, the better. I just thought of a great waty of doing this. Let's say you want to hire a sysadmin. You want him to Do Stuff. Say you draw up a rough job description, with a list of 10 things you want him to do (10% of time: ensure email infrastructure is running smoothly, 10% of time: maintenance of VCS, 10% of time: processing new account requests, whatever, I haven't really thought about this). You then make a dollar value for each one - we need $8,000 to keep our email going this year - bang! a good package to fundraise against. Just $10,000 to handle membership request backlog! OK - harder to sell. But you get the idea. You split the salary of the sysadmin across the things he'll do, and you can tell straight away what people are interested in, and what they're not. And if there's no funds coming in against the keep DNS running smoothly package, you can run a campaign against that, highlighting the problems we've had with DNS in the past. Yep. Definitely something the bizdev person can work with the community to drive. Thanks for the ideas. OK, it's not sexy, but you can maybe send donors a picture of a bind process running somewhere? ;) Cheers, Dave. -- behdad http://behdad.org/ Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety. -- Benjamin Franklin, 1759 -- marketing-list mailing list marketing-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/marketing-list
Re: Boosting Friends of GNOME in 2008
Le mardi 22 avril 2008, à 23:53 +0300, Lucas Rocha a écrit : Doing this already. The design will be the GNOME equation[1] with the message I'm a Friend of GNOME!. The color is will be green but this might change depending on the availability of mugs with the desired color. Hmm, I still haven't uploaded the SVG for this, it seems. Here we go: http://www.gnome.org/~vuntz/gnomefr/promotion/fosdem-2008-t-shirt-equation-front.svg And if people want to remake the same t-shirt: http://www.gnome.org/~vuntz/gnomefr/promotion/fosdem-2008-t-shirt-equation-back.svg Vincent -- Les gens heureux ne sont pas pressés. -- marketing-list mailing list marketing-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/marketing-list
Re: Boosting Friends of GNOME in 2008
On Tue, 2008-04-22 at 23:53 +0300, Lucas Rocha wrote: 3. Prepare a program for long-term donors The idea is to provide ways to easily make monthly donations. We'll provide ways for donating 5, 10, 20 or 50 per month (this might change but that's the general idea) through Paypal. The donor would receive the benefit after the last payment. In other words: - If a person donates 5, 10, or 20 per month, he/she would get a mug - If a person donates 50 per month, he/she would get a t-shirt We could give the benefits in advance but then it could be cancelled just after starting... Thinking about it again, I think we should send the gift up front. It's just so much nicer a message than hey, we don't send you your gift such that you don't cancel, because you know, we don't trust you. And the gift's value is less than one or two monthly payments, so we're not talking about net loss here. 4. Promoting Friends of GNOME After we have everything setup (mugs, t-shirts and long-term donation program), make a nice campaign to get short-term and long-term donors. The equation (in the mug and t-shirt) would be the moto for this campaign. Comments? More ideas? --lucasr [1] http://www.gnome.org/img/flash/gnome-equation.png -- behdad http://behdad.org/ Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety. -- Benjamin Franklin, 1759 -- marketing-list mailing list marketing-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/marketing-list
