Fundraising in KDE

[Boudewijn Rempt]

Ha, cool! I hadn't thought of this when I started thinkg we should copy blender's dev fund for Krita. I basically always look at what blender is doing to see whether it would fit for Krita. Here are some notes:

On Wednesday, 23 September 2020 00:53:34 CEST Carl Schwan wrote:

> 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.

Currently, for Krita we get about 3,000 euros a month in donations. We have about 300,000 downloads from the website in a month, which means we get about a euro for every thousand downloads. We get about 18,000 euros through sales on steam and in the Windows store, which is what is actually paying for the core team. I've also made money for Krita through NRE funding from Intel, but that source of income has stopped (and besides, we were usually losing money on it.)

> 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.

Krita is losing recurring donations at a much faster rate than usual since the beginning of august. People really are looking into their subscriptions at the moment, which is totally understandable.
 
> 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.

We couldn't make civicrm work either... Despite hiring consultants.

<...>

> 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.

Yay!

> 
> 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 ;)

Yes, messaging -- for Blender it's easy because there are many companies funding them for whom blender is a complement that replaces expensive alternatives. It's different for KDE, so that needs good thinking.

Also... Just like Blender, KDE probably needs to setup a second legal entity that can fund freelance developers for certain projects or even outright hire them. 

> 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 :)

Well, obviously, I'm all for it :-)

-- 
https://www.krita.org