Fundraising in KDE

Wed Sep 23 08:55:55 BST 2020

Hi,

On 2020-09-23 00:53, Carl Schwan wrote:
> Hello everyone,
> 
> Nate gave an excellent talk at the Akademy about how we can konquer the 
> world
> and reach new horizons with our software. One of the first steep for 
> Nate is
> for the e.V. to start paying more developers to work on core KDE 
> technologies.
> 
> I believe there is an even more important steep before, finding the 
> money to
> pay the developers. The current incomes of the e.V. are €183.883 while
> the expense
> is €258.851. No need to be good in maths to understand that we are 
> losing money.
> This is normal because we were hoarding too much money for a long time 
> without
> spending it, but this is still not a sustainable situation and if we 
> start
> paying developers we will need to find even more money.
> 
> KDE's current incomes come from donations from companies (€60 000) but 
> also from
> doing one time donations (€35 000) or recurring donations (€9000) from
> individuals. There is also a lot of companies that help by sponsoring 
> the
> Akademy and other events organized by KDE. The numbers above are only
> my prognostics
> looking at the current trends.
> 
> Many thanks to all these wonderful people donating money to the e.V. 
> but this
> is unfortunately not enough and if we want to start paying developers 
> we will
> need to change our fundraising strategy radically.
> 
> One of the reasons why we don't raise as many funds as we could is 
> because of
> the failure of our recurring donation system. When the money raised 
> through the
> one-time donation system increase by 50% in just one year, the 
> recurring
> donation system lost 10% of its donors at the same time.
> 
> Currently, we are using CiviCRM as our donation system, CiviCRM is a 
> Customer
> Relationship Management for non-profit and non-governmental groups. 
> CiviCRM
> is a complex web application and has many features for non-profit, we 
> are
> currently using the CiviContribute extension to manage the recurrent 
> donations.
> 
> Unfortunately, like the numbers are telling, this doesn't work well. We 
> have
> technical difficulties with the system. The problems are not new and 
> there were
> multiple attends to fix then by hiring CiviCRM specialized consultants. 
> KDE e.V.
> recently hired new consultants, and I'm crossing my fingers that this 
> time it
> will work. This would at least solve some problems for the time being.
> 
> Another problem to solve is the design of the website: To make it 
> short,
> [relate.kde.org](https://relate.kde.org) is ugly and needs a visual
> refresh and an update of the content. So I developed a new theme, 
> available
> [here](https://invent.kde.org/carlschwan/civicrm-relate-docker/-/tree/main/aether).
> It's not perfect but a lot better than the current one and it was quite 
> a
> horror story (more on that later).
> 
> And the last problem is also how we are positioning our donation 
> system.
> Currently, it's a traditional organization membership fee and this is 
> the reason
> why we are using CiviCRM. When someone pays €100 per year, they become
> a KDE e.V.
> supporting member. Their donation helps KDE e.V. in its activities 
> (sponsoring
> sprints, servers, ...). This works if we want KDE to remain a small and
> traditional organization developing software as a hobby, but I don't 
> think this
> is our goal. Our vision is:
> 
> "A world in which everyone has control over their digital life and 
> enjoys
> freedom and privacy."
> 
> And to achieve this vision, we need to grow, get more people involved, 
> making
> sure that people can make a living by contributing to KDE and also 
> contribute
> to the less fun area of KDE (the thing that nobody cares about but is 
> really
> important like accessibility).
> 
> I believe that if we were to communicate more clearly how by donating, 
> we are
> able to improve our software and moving forward with our vision, it 
> should
> encourage more people to donate.
> 
> Moving forward I don't think CiviCRM is the solution for KDE. I'm quite 
> happy
> that the immediate problems will hopefully get resolved soon but we 
> need a
> better long term solution.
> 
> CiviCRM requires constant maintenance and since the business model is 
> having
> a network of consultants, it wasn't developed with easy of use in mind. 
> For
> example it doesn't use the standard PHP package manager `composer`, but 
> require
> instead of downloading each package manually and keeping track of the 
> version
> manually.
> 
> CiviCRM uses the infamous Drupal 7 theming engine for rendering the 
> pages.
> It means that instead of working with a templating engine like 99% of 
> the web
> frameworks, Drupal 7 works with hooks, hooks are function that gets 
> called
> when rendering a certain portion of a page. This creates a very 
> inflexible
> way to create a website and with some part of the layout that can only 
> be
> changed using JavaScript. CiviCRM doesn't help by creating a dumping 
> its forms
> without any way to customize the appearance unless you again use 
> JavaScript to
> change the HTML dynamically.
> 
> The good news is that CiviCRM will soon switch to Drupal 8 and use a 
> normal
> templating engine, but it also means that the theme will need to be
> rewritten and data migrated. And Drupal 8 will be EOL in November 2021, 
> so we
> will need to rewrite two times our theme in 1 year.
> 
> There are many other parts of CiviCRM that I think are not great, and
> if someone interested in hearing more I would happily give you more 
> details.
> 
> But more importantly, I don't think CiviCRM is adapted for our needs of 
> a simple
> but also a super-efficient donation system.
> 
> Because of this, I experimented with a new system based on the Blender 
> Fund
> project. Blender Fund was developed by Blender devs and allowed Blender 
> to
> raise enough money to employ many Blender devs to work full time on 
> Blender.
> This allowed Blender to become a leading 3D creation suite. See
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jcl3--cbULk. Blender Fund is licensed 
> under
> GPL and is based on Django.
> 
> A demo of my proposed system can be found here: 
> https://fund.carlschwan.eu/
> and the repo https://invent.kde.org/websites/fund-krita-org. A nice 
> thing
> about the system is that it is easy to switch the skin for other 
> projects
> (e.g. https://krita-fund.carlschwan.eu).
> 
> An interesting feature is that it is already integrated with the future
> replacement of KDE Identity (code name MyKDE). So you can already login 
> in to
> these demos using your KDE Identity credentials. Another feature is
> that donators
> get a badge that they can display on their profile page in MyKDE.
> 
> You can also try to subscribe to payment using this fake credit card:
> 4111111111111111 with an expiration date in the future and play around.
> 
> I strongly believe that this can be a part of the solution, but just a 
> part
> of the solution. We also need to change our messaging and make our 
> goals more
> clear. These are a social problem and not a technical one ;)
> 
> My plans for migration would be to run the old CiviCRM system and the 
> new
> one at the same time, encourage the CiviCRM donors to renew their 
> subscriptions
> in the new system and shutdown CiviCRM then we decide it's not worth 
> supporting
> anymore. This is why it is so important that CiviCRM still works and 
> the recent
> efforts to make it somewhat work again won't go to waste.
> 
> Please let me know if this is worth putting more effort into it or if
> the current
> system is good enough. I feel like this should be a community decision, 
> since
> fundraising is everyone's concern. Also, any help is welcome :)

Given our use of CiviCRM is problematic since years and any improvement 
to our
supportive member campaign is really helpful, I personally think this 
would be a
really awesome thing to have.

As we are spending money to get CiviCRM up and running, perhaps this 
would be some
place for some investment, too, if needed and if the switch would 
provide both
for a better user experience on one side and better handling of 
invoicing for the e.V.

And yes, for sure, even your small demo site https://fund.carlschwan.eu/ 
makes a very
good impression.

Greetings
Christoph

-- 
Ignorance is bliss...
https://cullmann.io | https://kate-editor.org