Appropedia:Fundraising: Difference between revisions

Fundraising is an essential part of sustaining the Appropedia Foundation and the Appropedia wiki, and having greater impact.

Key tasks

Top priorities

• Finish some MOUs and make them official (Ekopedia so far) and discuss with partners. While we have great relationships with fantastic, reputable organizations, an MOU helps to demonstrate this fact to funders (as well as having other advantages in providing a point of reference for future cooperation).
• Make a good support page for those site visitors who would support us (that page especially for "crowdsourcing".) All the Category:About Appropedia pages are important for our fundraising activities. In any page asking for donations, there needs to be:
• a clear "ask" and offer a symbolic "reward" in the donation request, creating a sense and some sort of visible evidence that their contribution is making a difference.
• demonstration of our credibility - this is both factual/logical and the overal impression.
• Work out arrangements with tax exempt orgs in other countries, that would let donors from those countries support projects connected to Appropedia (e.g. Summer of Content) and get a tax exemption. Chriswaterguy is pursuing one in Australia; Andrew and Chris are pursuing one or more possibilities in the UK. (Yeahvle knows that here in Sweden it have been some talks in our leading party of writing a bill, making it possible even here to deduct taxes against donations for nonprofits, culture and charities. They have never existed here but companies and individuals donate a lot to Save the Children, RedCross and so on...)

Ongoing tasks

• Develop relationships with funding bodies - whether or not they fund us, they may be supportive and helpful.
  • This partly involves making a lot of phone calls, to foundations as well as companies.
  • Look for cases where the organization's field of interest lines up with our area of work.
  • Develop ideas for projects or aspect of Appropedia's work that could be funded, at Appropedia:Fundraising working group/ideas.

Funding bodies

Funding bodies that we are or should be in conversation with (whether or not this directly leads to funding). Feel free to add suggestions!

• The Clarence Foundation Area of common interest: member of Open Sustainability Network, so clearly appreciates the importance of the work we do. (anyone in contact?)
• Google.org. Common interest: looks to have strategic impact; based on the power of the internet (conversations have started - October 2008) (Curt taking lead)
• The Body Shop. Common interest: small farmers in developing countries (well being, farming tech)

Any time we get knocked back - ask for suggestions of some other funders who might say yes.

Fundraising platforms

We need to choose one - or more than one - and run with it.

Hosted solutions - much easier to try and to set up, less time demand. (Probably the most logical alternative for us while we have no paid staff.)

• Change.org - a very active community of people who would appreciate what Appropedia is doing. The idea of having a donation method which is distinct from those used by for-profit is good for the impression we create; it also means being in a system that has something of a community feel and that a lot of people already recognize and use. Some of the blogs on change.org are actually very good - so the site will probably appeal to the kinds of people we want to engage with.
• Care2.com is also doing something a bit like change.org - but change.org seems to me to be the more engaging and successful one.
• ChipIn - enter "what you're collecting money for, how much you want to raise, and when you need it by." Then promote: "Embed the ChipIn Widget on your favorite Web site or create your own ChipIn page at yourname.chipin.com. Donations are made with ChipIn's secure service and PayPal.
• www.give2gether.com ?

Self-hosted:

• Set up a CiviCRM site?

Ideas

• Set up pledges for projects on e.g. Kickstarter

Won't they take a big fee on the money-transfer?

• Sell print versions of printouts of good categories? See the report Company sells 54,000 German Wikipedia article collections on Amazon. However, we would need to set up an arrangement with a friendly printer, and get a percentage of the sale. It might be seen as not very green, but encouraging surface shipping would help, as would making separate printing arrangements on different continents, to reduce the carbon footprint of shipping.

• It can be offered some sort of small token gifts to give to all active users and donators, as evidence of their support, and to make them show off the Appropedia logotype and webadress more in their community. These items must be made small, cheap and symbolic, like a diploma/certificate (printed on nice paper and sent in post or optional emailed pdf-version), embroidered textile badges, pins/buttons, calendar for a year (12 months with a photo from a AT-project on each months page, if done with beautiful photos it could become a collectors item, such as the long tradition of the Pirelli Calendar^W), textile shopping bags, tshirts.

Larger, heavier and plastic objects should be avoided (i.e. Coffee mugs, car-bumper-stickers) (depending on production cost, weight and postage costs this would require setting a minimum donation level for each "gift", could result in huge administration? if done in large scale, and with too many options)

• Perhaps it is possible to find collaborating project where unemployed and poor produce hand made gifts, (although shipping could eat up a lot of the donations). So it is possible to share the gratitude and greeting "online": making some short video clips showing different AT-projects that the money goes to in developing nations (with personalised greetings, fun messages in different languages on-screen) and/or (with a list of names of the donators on the side of the video)

This could become popular for the donators to send around the link to their friends, or post on their facebook page, to show what they are funding, or small companies can donate a sum of money equalling the cost of this christmas cards, that they usually sends to business contacts. And on this video page that people sending around is making Appropedia logo, web adress and motto visible to more future donators.

• Art auction. If any volunteer is out on a AT-project and gets good contact with a school or creative painters, photographers, artisans we could build contact network with them for use in online auctions, monthly or yearly event, where we auction paintings, landscape- or art-photos (the originals could be rolled up and sent by post, or digital high resolution files can be emailed or put on a database, so that buyers can go to a local printer- or photo-store to buy a large printed copy framed)

A version of bidding that I find little bit funny and causes auctions go faster, impulsively and potentially yields bigger income is the dutch auction^W method.

Specific requests

A program or something with a fairly well defined cost, approach and intended outcome, such as: interns, or technology upgrade, or porting of CD3WD content, or merging with Ekopedia, or making the site integrate effectively (API and more) with OAN, EWB-UK, WiserEarth etc.

Proposing a modest-sized project, raising a bit of money and executing the program, will be really important for establishing a track record, and of course be good for Appropedia.

Ideas are listed at Appropedia:Fundraising working group/Specific requests.

External links

• Turn your website into a fundraising machine
• Fundraising Resources for Community-Based Organizations in the Developing World (list of links - may be useful ideas for a small organization)

Members

Please help out - join the subcommittee. Consider adding your email address, and/or turning on alerts in your preferences, and watching this page.

• Curtbeckmann (lead)
• Andrew.lamb
• Chriswaterguy
• Joel.scott