Re: Boosting Friends of GNOME in 2008

[Dave Neary <bolsh gnome org>]

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
bolsh gnome org