Below you will find the Fundraising Team's February report. Please let us know if you have any questions!
## Grants
DRL: We have been working on submitting two full proposals to DRL, one for usability (joint project with Tails & Guardian Project) and another for scalability. We will submit these at the beginning of March.
Zcash Foundation: Zcash Foundation granted us $50,000 to work on the Specification phase of the Walking Onions proposal[1]. Thank you Chelsea for making this connection, and to Nick for helping to write the proposal and advocate for the work. We still need funding for the proof-of-concept and implementation phases of Walking Onions. If you know someone, or some entity, that might be interested in supporting this work, please let us know!
Nathan Cummings Foundation: A joint proposal with FPF we submitted was declined.
DIAL Open Source Center: We submitted a small proposal to DIAL to help support the Walking Onions work.
OTF: We are working on a third round of OTF revisions on the Tor Browser proposal. We submitted a Learning Lab application to help publicize the onion services work in Sponsor 30. OTF also agreed to fund an in-person meeting to do some work on DDoS protections as it pertains to high profile onion services.
We submitted some informal requests to the Judith Neilson Institute for Journalism & Ideas and the Omidyar Foundation. We also met with the Internet Society Foundation.
## Donate Buttons on Website
We closely monitor organic donations made via donate.torproject.org. By ‘organic’ we mean non-monthly donations generated primarily via donate links throughout our webpages. It is important to track this income because it accounted for $231,472 in FY18, $239,479 in FY19, and $334,418 so far in FY20. Small changes to our web pages can affect this income. This graph[2] shows average daily online income per month. This clearly illustrates the importance of our EOY campaign and the call to action on about:tor.
There are a few other events to note in the past year. The new website launched in March 2019. The first iteration did not include a prominent donate button and the average daily income decreased until we made the donate button yellow April 26th. Then average daily income increased modestly, and increased significantly after May 26th when we added the donate link to about:tor. Since that addition, we have been averaging $600 per day in organic donations (except during the campaign when the average was significantly more.)
At the end of February 2020, we saw a sharp decline in these organic donations. We suspected the redesign of /download was partially responsible. Antonela quickly added the yellow donate button back to that page and we saw donations go back up to about where they were in early February. This prompted us to take a look at other modifications and we decided to highlight the donate language on /thank-you and the donate language on about:tor will be updated upon the next release. We are also beginning plans to update donate.torproject.org and are working with Giant Rabbit to be able to make those changes ourselves.
## Events
We are still planning for the major donor event in San Francisco March 26th and foundation lunch in New York April 13th. Hopefully covid-19 will not alter those plans.
## Newsletter/Email list
We are still seeing around 10,000 people join our email list each month and now have over 179,000 subscribers. Since the list was so large, it was taking around 24 hours to send an email message to the whole group. Giant Rabbit made some changes to our system and now a bulk email is delivered in around 3 hours. Each new subscriber gets a welcome email a day or two after they join the list and then are offered a sticker pack for a $17 donation a few weeks after that.
[1] https://grants.zfnd.org/proposals/1642205075-walking-onions-scaling-the-tor-... https://grants.zfnd.org/proposals/1642205075-walking-onions-scaling-the-tor-network
[2] https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/attachment/wiki/org/teams/Fundraisi... https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/attachment/wiki/org/teams/FundraisingTeam/MonthlyReports/2020February/Average%20Organic%20Donations%20Per%20Month.png
Sarah Stevenson (she/her) Fundraising Director The Tor Project sstevenson@torproject.org
Take back the internet with Tor. https://donate.torproject.org/
Public Key: 93B3 AC08 4257 FA3D D4BB 8E95 CC08 5DBA C015 612A
Hello! First off, we want to send light, love, and health to you all! Please reach out to us for any reason - especially with any suggestions or questions about our fundraising roadmap.
## COVID-19 and Fundraising
Nonprofit organizations across the globe are seeing a downturn in donations from individuals. Many donors are ending their automatic recurring donations. We, too, saw some decrease in donations from individuals in the month of March. Outside of the EOY campaign, we see an average of around $600 per day donated through the website. In March, the daily average was $468. This is not too dramatic a drop, but it will affect our revenue if the decline continues. We are brainstorming ways to reach out to current and potential donors and minimize the effects.
Our Defenders of Privacy (monthly donors) are sticking with us to a large extent. We normally see a decline in income from monthly donors in the first few months of each year, and this year is no different. We actually had a growth of almost $200 from February to March, with a total of $7,796 of income from this group of now 721 loyal donors. We are hoping our efforts to invite donors each month will lead to this program growing throughout the year, despite the uncertainty in the world.
## Grant Proposals
DRL: At the beginning of March we submitted two full proposals to DRL, one for a scalability project and one for a usability project in partnership with two subgrantees, Tails and Guardian Project. We will know more about whether or not these projects are accepted later this year.
OTF: Also at the beginning of March, we submitted a third revision of our OTF Tor Browser project. The proposal was accepted! Thank you to Matt, GeKo, & Pili who all worked tirelessly to help write and revise this proposal.
craigslist Charitable Fund: We submitted a short application to CCF for general operating funds.
Omidyar: We made an informal submission and we were declined.
We have also been doing some informal outreach to foundation prospects, none of which has led to formal applications, but are steps to building relationships and determining whether or not we are a good fit for different opportunities.
## Cultivation
We spent time connecting with current funders and major donors in the context of COVID-19. We sent informal check-ins and then followed up by sharing the blog post about remote work and personal safety[1] with each program officer and major donor.
## Events
We decided in early March to cancel the in-person happy hour we had been planning to host at EFF. We converted the event to a virtual happy hour on March 26th. We didn’t get as many attendees as we had hoped, but we received positive feedback from those who did take the time to attend. Isabela talked about the organizational side of Tor and Roger went into more technical detail. Cindy Cohn attended and talked about Tor’s need for contributions from individuals and asked each attendee to become a Champion of Privacy, if they were not a member of the giving group already. We have followed up with each of the attendees and shared the recording with those who did not attend.
We had been offered a complimentary sponsorship of Bitcoin2020 in San Francisco, but the event was postponed. We are hoping to be able to participate when it is rescheduled in Q3.
[1] https://blog.torproject.org/remote-work-personal-safety https://blog.torproject.org/remote-work-personal-safety
Sarah Stevenson (she/her) Fundraising Director The Tor Project sstevenson@torproject.org
Public Key: 93B3 AC08 4257 FA3D D4BB 8E95 CC08 5DBA C015 612A
Hi,
I see that Stripe featured the work of an SF community organization during its virtual all hands meeting a couple weeks ago and raised $10,000 for the organization from its staff. I wonder if Stripe--or another company--might consider something like that for Tor?
The tweet from @sfnewdeal: Thanks @stripe for featuring our work in your virtual all-hands this morning! We received $10k in donations from generous “Stripes” in an hour! @patrickc #neighborshelpingneighbors #sfnewdeal #SaveSmallBusiness
Just a thought,
Kate Krauss (former comms and public policy lead for Tor, for new folks)
tor-project@lists.torproject.org
-
Kate Krauss -
Sarah Stevenson