Hey Folks,
The Software Freedom Conservancy is making a strong push to move away from dependence on large corporate donors to be sustained by more individual donations.
They are asking individual projects to do a bit of advertising for them.
The Conservancy has been nothing but good for us and to us; if we can help spread this word, I think that would be a good. So please share their plea, which is here: http://sfconservancy.org/supporter/
If someone found a good way to insert that into the web site as well, that might be a nice thing as well.
Cheers,
Jeremy
-------- Forwarded Message -------- Subject: Conservancy fundraiser launching on Monday Date: Sun, 22 Nov 2015 00:46:16 -0500 From: Karen Sandler karen@sfconservancy.org Reply-To: karen@sfconservancy.org To: project-reps@sfconservancy.org
Hi project reps!
I wanted to give you all a heads up that Conservancy is launching a big fundraiser on Monday. As many of you know, it's been difficult to find financial stability for Conservancy... the 10% that you all contribute is very much appreciated but doesn't cover even one staffer plus basic overhead and the services we provide are greater than our peer fiscal sponsorship organizations. We need additional support to be able to survive, and while we've relied on corporate donations to do that (and will continue to seek that support) it's too capricious to serve as our primary funding source. We've concluded that we need a base of individual supporters we can rely on annually in order to close that gap. We launched our Supporter program last December but without an urgent message behind it we've been unable to get the number of donors that we need.
We have structured the campaign with two levels - a lower level that will sustain the organization for a 'bare minimum' service plan to you, our member projects, and a separate, higher level to continue doing license enforcement and other more complex legal work in service to our projects. While our campaign focuses on GPL enforcement, we know many of you are not invested in copyleft at all. Not meeting this goal means we'll scale back much of the licensing, trademark and patent-related services we provide.
The message we have for the campaign frames the problem as urgent, but the urgency relates to the next fiscal year (since that's how we plan our budget). Given the commitments we've lined up we have about a year to reassess if the fundraiser fails, and we'll have time to work with you to figure out how we transition to the next phase, whether it's reducing our services or moving to a volunteer model relying a lot more on all of you.
We hope you will help us to meet our goal. Our effective number, given the small base we already have signed up as supporters, will be around 500 new sign ups. If each project can get just 15-20 people to sign up for just $10 per month, we'll meet the bottom goal easily. Conservancy still gets a lot done with very little, so our urgent needs really are attainable if you all help us get there.
Please promote the campaign when it launches, blog and microblog about your positive experiences with Conservancy and encourage your contributors and users to sign up.
Thanks so much for all of your hard work, and I hope we can continue with uninterrupted support for your excellent projects which inspire us every day!
karen
Karen M. Sandler Executive Director, Software Freedom Conservancy __________ Become a Supporter today! http://sfconservancy.org/supporter/