[kde-community] Fundraising

[Jos Poortvliet]

So, today we finished two fundraisers. Randa and Krita.

Randa reached almost Eur 15.000, Krita closed at amost 20K. Congrats to both!

I blogged yesterday about how we, imho, fail to reach enough people in our 
quest for more freedom [1]. That had of course a wider scope - but KDE is a 
part of this struggle. I know we don't all share this as a highest goal - we 
care about many different things.

But for sure, most of these goals would greatly benefit from improved funding 
of our e.V. And funding would go better if we managed to reach more of our 
audience - KDE *users*.

The question I ask myself is: what percentage of KDE users had the 
opportunity to contribute to our fund raisers? How many *knew* about it?

1% perhaps? A little more? Even less? It is certainly hard to estimate. Why 
does it matter? If it IS around 1%, it means we can reach far more people - 
and have an easier time reaching our goals.

I think in these two fundraisers we went to the limit of our 'natural' reach. 
I can't believe we can blog and tweet and share MORE than we did. There is 
simply no order of magnitude growth possible there. We need another solution.

So, let me be bold and give a suggestion (that isn't new at all [2]):
lets use our *software* to reach out to our users and tell them how they 
could help us.

Right now, we depend on users actively reaching out to us, to read planet 
KDE, our dot and kde.org, to find out how to help. Let's make it easier. 
Let's reach out to them.

I'm not suggesting a irremovable flashing banner on the panel and pink fluffy 
bunnies running over the window decoration, carrying signs "donate to KDE". 
Perhaps unicorns. Certainly no bunnies ;-)

No, goal is to INFORM our users that they could participate, help us, in 
various ways. In a decent way. With the simple option to ignore us.

And yes, there are some technical difficulties, and we'd have to work with 
the distributions. I'm sure we can have a conversation about that - but I'd 
like to know first: do we *want* this in the first place? Because if we 
*want* it, I am certain we can *do* it. We're KDE ;-)

If we decide we do, let's talk where and how.

/J

[1] http://blog.jospoortvliet.com/2014/07/puppy-eyes-versus-freedom.html
[2] http://lists.kde.org/?l=kde-core-devel&m=140483544104310&w=2 and this has 
been discussed by many people over the years. Time to take action?
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