Thoughts going into today's meeting

[Dave McIlhagga]

FunCom,

OK - at last, trying to get some ideas on paper here before we meet re. 
fundraising activities. We can discuss in more detail when we meet on IRC.

First of all, let's consider various sources of funding for OSGeo, here 
are a few and some considerations about how to be successful with these 
initiatives.


1. Individuals - SWAG, Donations

We've had some preliminary discussion on this -- Michael Gerlek has 
already done some good work setting up a CafePress web site. It should 
be noted that in order for these types of initiatives to be successful 
requires an associated Marketing plan/effort to get the word out. Think 
about the FireFox push that was so successful -- this was in fact a very 
well coordinated and executed marketing strategy.

Fortunately there is really no cost to having the CafePress running -- 
so there is no harm in having this available along with visible links on 
the OSGeo web site.

There was also some discussion of PayPal donation links -- this is also 
a good idea, but I'm not fully versed on what we need to do in terms of 
tracking donations, issuing tax receipts, etc..


2. Corporate, Gov't, NGO Sponsorship

There have been three levels proposed for this -- a couple of quick 
thoughts:

- My sense is that we need our top sponsorship level to be 50k. This is 
a standard large sponsorship amount we can get out of the big boys.
- We need to clearly define the value proposition for the various levels 
--> why should an organization put in more $$$?
--> what additional value does he get?
- Generally - we should be aiming the majority of our effort around 
sponsorships that are not project-specific -- I'd like to think of any 
money that comes in related to a project as a bonus rather than our 
standard approach.


3. Grants and Contracts to Gov't & Charitable Foundations

This can be useful, but in order to be sensitive to non-compete issues 
should be targeted at a couple of scenarios:

a) Funding for activities not easily funded through a single corporate 
entity (OSGeo stack comes to mind, or some geodata activities)
b) Funding that could not go through a private corporation, and can only 
come through a third party entity



This is some initial thoughts - we can discuss further on IRC in a 
couple of hours.

Dave