will binns:
> 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...
Thanks for moving this on a public space!
> 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?
To extract past achievements it will be easier to base our work on
release notes (for stuff release in the ISO image itself) and monthly
reports (for other achievements of the projects outside of the ISO image
itself). These are in
http://tails.boum.org/news/, see version_*.mdwn
and report_2015_*.mdwn in Git (or on the online website). And also on
the proposal we pasted to fundraising grants.
Same again for the future plans, we have (or will have) stuff written
for funders and should reuse it here. Other than that we have a draft
roadmap here:
https://tails.boum.org/blueprint/roadmap_2016-2017
>> 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?
Clearly, there was a big batch of donations when going the blog post and
corresponding tweet at the end of the year. And then smaller ones over
the year.
> Is there a donation goal amount?
We're working on budget numbers for 2016 (minimal and optimal), but that
will also partly covered by grants which are still uncertain. So no,
there's no strict and clear goal amount, so we know that we would really
like to over our minimal budget from donations only to be sustainable
even outside of grants. But again, that's a goal over the year, not only
for the run.
> 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.
Right, but we could set a goal that make sense in relation to our
minimal budget and campaign period.
I'm also not sure how feasible the progress bar is technically speaking.
That's what I was more interested in knowing from you actually.
Currently get funds through different means (tax-deducible US
crowdfunding, German bank account, Bitcoins) so I wonder technically
speaking how this could work.
>> 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.
How would we split these blog posts and create the big picture? Should
we have, posts for each of these:
- general post about why it is important to donate to free software
- achievement over 2015
- plans for 2016
Anything else? Another split maybe?
> 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.
Great. That's something I don't really know about myself. Where shall we
start? Looking at our followers and see which are the most influential
then contacting them directly?
> 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.
We sent no email to past donors last year as it was the first time we
got donations (or at least emails associated to them). Not that we have
emails only for the people who donated to Zwiebelfreunde through Paypal.
> 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?"
Sure, it doesn't have to be something super different but a bit
personalized yes.
>> 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.
Regarding where precisely you can help. I think that you are already
very helpful on drafting the general strategy. But then I guess I will
have to provide the highlights, summarize past achievements, future
plans, etc. You can then of course help redacting all that and structure
the blog posts. We will probably anyway have to work together quite
closely on the text itself as I'm the one who wrote most of our public
communications so I know the terminology, etc. Then you will definitely
be most helpful on the social media strategy, scheduling, contacting key
people, redacting tweets, etc.
I feel like we need to draft the structure of the whole blog post
campaign before knowing how frequent and when they will be posted.
> 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"
Was do you mean by "pin" here?
> we could also attach a graphic of a QR code
> for our BTC address so people can donate straight from Twitter.
Yes, we're working on that in #10176.
>> 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.
Maybe we could find other people to relay our posts there. If we get a
list of influent people on Twitter to retransmit our stuff, maybe we can
also ask them to do it on other social media.
