Donations moved from SPI to SFC too?

[Rich Brown]

Thank you for sending along those links to the SPI reports. I don't think i had seen that information previously.

> On Sep 17, 2020, at 3:54 PM, Baptiste Jonglez <baptiste at bitsofnetworks.org> wrote:
> 
> Just one data point, donations seem to be have increased in 2019:
> 
> https://www.spi-inc.org/treasurer/reports/201612/#index58h4
> https://www.spi-inc.org/treasurer/reports/201712/#index55h4
> https://www.spi-inc.org/treasurer/reports/201812/#index56h4
> https://www.spi-inc.org/treasurer/reports/201912/#index57h4
> 
> It's already 2k€ / year without having a lot of publicity about it.

This is excellent. 

> Anyway, you cannot plan how much will be donated, and establishing a
> fine-grained budget is hard and probably not that useful here.  But it
> would still be interesting to publish:
> 
> - how much is needed for recurring costs (servers, domain, etc)
> - how additional money would be used in the long term (conferences, legal
>  fees, etc)

Yes. We need to create a budget that covers all our operating expenses (servers, DNS registry, legal, accounting, etc - maybe 3,500 Euros per year) plus an amount to fund an annual conference. (The Hamburg meeting was excellent: we developed a lot of plans and built a lot of interpersonal trust. I don't know what it cost, but I think we were pretty frugal.) 

I agree it is difficult to predict the actual outcome of a fund raising effort, so I suggest this plan:

a) Set a target amount that we would like to raise. That target amount should be larger than the budget we create above.

b) Design a campaign to ask the OpenWrt community for contributions. It would refer to the budget, and explain why we are doing this, and how the funds will be used. This need not be smarmy - think Wikipedia requests, not used-car salesman. I envision that we would place a well-crafted request on the Donations page, and place occasional requests on the Forum. (We can vary the frequency of those requests to increase/decrease the number of responses we receive.)

c) Decide what to do if the contributions dramatically exceed our budgeted needs. One thought I had was to reimburse our founders who for years have paid for the infrastructure from their own pockets. (This puts us *all* in their debt.) I suspect they never expected any compensation, but I don't think they would mind a few thousand Euros coming their way.

Thoughts? Thanks.

Rich

> Baptiste
> 
> On 16-09-20, Rich Brown wrote:
>> Before we go asking for money on the wiki, I'd like a little clarity about what we will do with the money. (Before you react negatively... I think we *should* ask for contributions. I'm a little concerned that the page doesn't ask for *enough* money. Here's my thinking...)
>> 
>> * Each of the Hetzner servers costs 50 Euros/month. Our Infrastructure page lists five of them.
>> * Assorted domain name registrations and assorted expenses probably add another 100-500 Euros per year. 
>> * We're looking at a total of 50 x 5 x 12, or 3,000 to 3,500 Euros/year (US$4,200/year) This is a substantial (not crushing, but still non-trivial) amount of money.
>> * This expense is currently being funded by people who are already working their tails off for the project
>> 
>> I don't know exactly how the SFC will handle any contributions we receive nor do I know anything about the tax laws outside the US, but we have clear expenses that offset a significant portion of the revenue (the contributions) we receive. That should minimize the tax effect.
>> 
>> Let's talk about what it would mean to be wildly successful. By my book, that would at least 10% more than our monthly expenses. Do we know how many active people are using OpenWrt? Could we get 100 people to contribute 3 Euros/month? Or 300 people to contribute 1 Euro/month? (We'd need to be aware of the transaction costs at those low dollar values...)
>> 
>> The Donations page needs to give people reasons to donate their hard-earned cash. I believe we also need to suggest an amount that helps us be successful. (American public television and radio now gets well over 50% of their contributions from "sustaining subscribers" - note the incredibly affirming name for these people - they "sustain" the tv/radio shows with their subscription...)
>> 
>> So... I've said a lot. Is a goal of covering our expenses + 10% a good target? Thanks.
>> 
>> Rich
>> 
>> 
>> 
>>> On Sep 16, 2020, at 12:23 PM, Thomas Endt <tmo26 at gmx.de> wrote:
>>> 
>>>> -----Ursprüngliche Nachricht-----
>>>> Von: Thomas Endt <tmo26 at gmx.de>
>>>> Gesendet: Montag, 14. September 2020 12:23
>>> 
>>> [...]
>>> 
>>>> Regarding the new Donate button: I will look into this later this day.
>>> 
>>> Please take a look: https://openwrt.org/inbox/donate2
>>> 
>>> If OK, I can move the page to https://openwrt.org/donate
>>> 
>>> Regards,
>>> 
>>> Thomas
>>> 
>>> 
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>> 
>> 
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