[Fundraising] Thoughts going into today's meeting

[Frank Warmerdam]

Dave McIlhagga wrote:
> 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.

Dave,

I'm ammenable to this.

> - We need to clearly define the value proposition for the various levels 
> --> why should an organization put in more $$$?

I'm interested in input on this.  My well is dry.

> --> 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.

I agree that OSGeo should be aiming for general sponsorship without
project specific direction.  *But* we are also hoping that the various
project folks will be going out and looking for sponsorship in their
user community, and it is reasonable to expect that they will prefer
project directed sponsorships.

To be honest, when I go out to my GDAL user community, I'm going to be
selling sponsorships mostly in terms of how they can sustain the GDAL
project if they are GDAL directed, so I think we need to realistic
about this.

One of the points Gary frequently raises is "what are we doing for the
projects".  Collecting sponsorships that include project directed monies
that get turned around into useful work for the projects is useful to
these projects (I would claim).  So, lets not consider the project
directed portions to be wasted in any regard.

Nevertheless, we clearly need quite a bit of strings-free money to
support the goals of the foundation, and we should write the sponsorship
web pages to aim at "general sponsorship" as the primary goal, and
projected directed sponsorships as an option.

> 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

I generally agree, but I'm not sure how this will work out in detail.
For instance, the EDRC BAA could easily be addressed by a private
contractor, but it has been suggested to me that doing it through
OSGeo would be useful in terms of raising the profile of OSGeo within
the military, and also it helps ensure that the money is spent on
a shared project rather than a one-off by a contractor.

On the other hand, if a private contractor wanted to bid the ERDC BAA
in a manner that supported our goal - an OSGeo binary stack - I would
hesitant to try and compete with them.

... meeting in 5 minutes!

Best regards,
-- 
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I set the clouds in motion - turn up   | Frank Warmerdam, warmerdam at pobox.com
light and sound - activate the windows | http://pobox.com/~warmerdam
and watch the world go round - Rush    | President OSGF, http://osgeo.org