Hello from the Fundraising Team! Below you will find our March report.
## Cryptocurrency
As mentioned last month, we launched our new cryptocurrency page[1]. This took a lot of work to understand and set up wallets and a mechanism to exchange coins to USD. We also had to create a workflow for acknowledging and recording donations in our CRM. So far, we have raised close to $18,000 by connecting with cryptocurrency enthusiasts on Twitter and have a few prospects for major gifts in the coming months. We also received some blog mentions[2][3][4][5][6] that have helped drive donations. We have received many suggestions for revisions and additions that we will tackle soon.
## Welcome email
We created a welcome email[7] that gets sent to people who have just joined our email list. The intention is to set the tone for our relationship with the person, teach them a bit about what we do, and talk about how we are a nonprofit that depends on contributions from individuals. The communication about being a nonprofit organization came from the research done by The Berkeley Group who found most people they surveyed were unaware of that status. This message has gone out to over 22,500 new subscribers so far and has been well-received.
## Grants
Al and the grants team wrote and submitted proposals to the following funders for the following projects: Indela Fund for LFI, craigslist Charitable Foundation for general operating funds, and the British Embassy of San Jose for digital security trainings in Costa Rica. We also submitted a letter of intent to the Charles Koch Foundation and two SOIs to DRL - one for OONI and another for UX/Community work. We also had a meeting with our program officer from the Media Democracy Fund.
## Administrative
We worked with Isa and Sue to create fundraising projections for the remainder of this fiscal year and the next. This will allow us to better track our progress and create project budgets.
Sarah attended the Data Privacy Summit in DC, hosted by Access Now, which was primarily about policy, but we have a few new contacts for potential collaboration.
- Fundraising Team