Re: [Tails-project] End of Year Fundraising

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Author: will binns
Date:  
To: tails-project
Subject: Re: [Tails-project] End of Year Fundraising
Hi All, as per Sajolida's suggestion, copying the mailing list here on
the topic of "End of Year Fundraising" in case anyone else wants to join
in. :)

Also, replying in-line, below, and continuing the conversation...

On 09/10/2015 06:22 AM, sajolida wrote:
> will binns:
>> Anonym mentioned I should contact you. Happy to help however I
>> can. For example, can design an HTML email to send out to last year's
>> donors, also, a series of blog posts. A social media campaign, stuff
>> like that. Maybe something on Indiegogo, I dunno.
> Last we did a single blog post, see:
>
> https://tails.boum.org/news/who_are_you_helping/
>
> This year I want to at least do this and write to last year's donors. I
> want to include in the post our achievements over 2015 and our project
> for 2016.

In terms of achievements, would it be helpful to look at closed tickets
in Redmine and pull out a list of them for you? Or do you already have a
short-list? Also, to do the same for current open tickets / upcoming in
2016?
> I also want to investigate whether we can have a progress bar tracking
> the donations. Do you have experience with setting this up?

Sure, in terms of donation activity though - if you look at last year's
donations, did they all come at once, over time? Is there a donation
goal amount? Sometimes a progress bar can work against an effort if it
gets closer to the end of the campaign and the bar is still mostly
incomplete - it can give a false impression that there is not much
interest in supporting a project.
> If you have more knowledge about that kind of things, maybe it would
> good to give ideas on whether we should do different contents on the
> blog and for past donors as well.

Yes, it would definitely be better to do multiple blog posts, as opposed
to one. These blog posts can be posted to our Twitter account. Also, we
can identify a short-list of people who are friendly to us on Twitter
who will retweet to help syndicate our messaging to their networks as
part of our funding drive.

Also for different content to past donors, yes, perhaps a personalized
email, it would be great to get a sample of the type of email that was
sent last year (if there was one) to see the overall theme that was used
at the time. Otherwise, it might just be helpful to reach out with a
personalized note, linking to an initial blog post kicking off the
funding drive (w/ accomplishments and upcoming goals) with the simple
polite question of, "is it possible you might be able to support us
again this year with another donation?"
> Or how we could keep the campaign going beyond a single blog post? How
> would you structure a serie of blog post for example? Also keep in mind
> that we are all super busy so we need to find something that's realistic
> to do with our resources.

Happy to write the blog posts, perhaps one a week, or one every two
weeks. Definitely not any less than that. Also, it seems we may benefit
from highlighting donation methods in the blog post. For example, seems
we had approx $18K in BTC donations in 2014, making it way more active
than say, PayPal. Also, perhaps we could pin a tweet to our Twitter
account through the end of the year, linking to our initial blog post,
saying "Help Support Tails" we could also attach a graphic of a QR code
for our BTC address so people can donate straight from Twitter.
>
> More social media presence would be cool as well as for example we're
> only using Twitter to post announcements but we could maybe do more.
> Other than Twitter I doubt that we will be willing to spend energy on
> more social media. But maybe we can find key person to help us on that.

Twitter is probably the best. Thinking perhaps it might be prudent to
post some of our blog content and/or fundraising messaging to some
subreddits, like r/Bitcoin, or others directly relevant to Tails/Tor/etc.