Request for help from Conservancy - be nice if we could respond

[Jeremy White]

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 at sfconservancy.org>
Reply-To: karen at sfconservancy.org
To: project-reps at 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/