sajolida:
> 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!
Writing again about this after a long break... Will, tell me if we can
still count you in :)
will@???
>> 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 still haven't found time to work on the content of the posts
themselves but I definitely want to have a draft before the end of the
month. I learned recently that Tor is going to do a crowdfunding
campaign as well at the end of the year and I'd like to at least post
our first post before they start their campaign.
Still, I think it's probably better that I work on the content of the
posts myself as I know the achievements and plans of the project better.
Will, I'm sure we can keep you busy with stuff like:
https://labs.riseup.net/code/issues/10176
This still looks quite important to me.
Maybe you'll be happy to know that we finally merged the new doc on how
to build the website from Tails [1]. Still, if you are not comfortable
coding in ikiwiki and Git, that's OK and you can already be much useful
doing mockups and giving ideas.
[1]:
https://tails.boum.org/contribute/build/website/#index2h1
https://labs.riseup.net/code/issues/10367
That's a follow-up on an idea of yours. I think the list of our
followers is public, do you know an easy way of extracting that
information? Ah, and @Snowden got a Twitter account recently, so it
might be worth checking with him if he can do some retweets :)
> [...]
>
>> 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.
I pretty much gave up on the progress bar for the time being as well.
I'd rather focus on other technical aspects (like #10176 and #9857) for
this year. So we don't have to worry about the goal amount.
Still, between the different posts we can check our Paypal balance and
feedback on what has been donated already.
>>> 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
I was wondering about the order of these... Shall we do the general post
first or last?
>> 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?
Now tracked by #10367, let's continue the discussion there.
>> 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.
That's now tracked by #10368. Then maybe if we want to get them involved
in spreading the call for donations it makes sense to write them and
everybody about the past achievements in the first post.
> [...]
>
>> 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.
I added the QR code to #10176:
https://labs.riseup.net/code/attachments/download/1007/1BvBMSEYstWetqTFn5Au4m4GFg7xJaNVN2.png
