[tor-project] October Fundraising Report

[Sarah Stevenson]

Hello! Here is what the Fundraising Team was up to in October. As always, let us know if you have any questions or suggestions!

## Grants
OTF: Our concept note submitted to OTF in September was accepted for a full proposal, which we submitted 10/15. This proposal covers the work to migrate Tor Browser from the ESR cycle to Firefox’s regular release cycle as well as implementing some ETP features in Tor Browser. OTF responded with questions and comments, and we are now working on a review of this full proposal, due 11/24.

Guerilla Foundation: We’ve started initial conversations about whether or not the Tor Project would be a good fit and have a meeting scheduled 12/12.

We’re continuing to build/re-engage relationships with large foundations: Sloan, Ford, Open Society, and Knight.

We had two proposals declined by the Glaser Progress Foundation and the Herb Block Foundation.

Coming soon:
NSF Dark Decoys project, due ?? (rolling)
Comcast Innovation Fund, due ?? (rolling)
The Nathan Cummings Foundation, due ?? (rolling)
Schox Philanthropy, due ?? (rolling)
Charles Stewart Mott Foundation, LOI due ?? (rolling)
Ethics & Excellence in Journalism, LOI due 11/15
OTF proposal review, due 11/24
UN Democracy Fund, LOI due 12/15
National Endowment for Democracy, due 1/10/2020 [tbd]

If you have any ideas, connections, or concerns about upcoming grant opportunities and the foundations on this list, please feel free to reach out directly or to grants at torproject.org.

## EOY Campaign
We launched the campaign, ‘Take back the internet with Tor,’ October 28th. Our first blog post laid out the theme of the campaign. [1] We sent an email to our list (137,849) names. This year we segmented this list and asked people for a specific contribution based on their past giving. This takes more time, but it resulted in many people upgrading.

As of this writing (11/18/19), we are seeing great engagement with the campaign. Our daily contributions through the website are up on average to $3,634 per day when the average was $1,932 in the first 20 days of the 2018 campaign. We’ve also had 128 people sign up to be monthly donors when we had 100 new monthly donors in the entire 2018 campaign.

We’ve moved our gift fulfillment to a mailhouse so Jon will not be burdened with sending out all of the shirt and sticker requests.

## Major Donors
We held a major donor reception in Boston at Wendy Seltzer’s home on October 28th. We had a handful of guests who appreciated remarks from Isa and Nick. All attendees received a packet of material about Tor as well as an ask to become a major donor. This was a good learning experience for us. For future events we need to ensure we have a bigger invite list so that we have more people in attendance. We are in the process of planning a bigger event in San Francisco in March.

## Cryptocurrency
The Giving Block got us set up with Brave AdGrants.[2] We have seen good engagement through these ads resulting in Brave BAT tips as well as people making donations through our website. We have also seen good engagement on Twitter with folks connected to Brave.[3]

We attempted to secure an EOY cryptocurrency match from Kraken, but it did not come through this year. We will continue to engage in hopes of having support from them next year.

Cryptocurrency gifts continue to come in steadily. We are hoping the value of bitcoin increases through the end of the year, which should result in increased contributions.

[1] https://blog.torproject.org/take-back-internet-us <https://blog.torproject.org/take-back-internet-us>
[2] https://www.thegivingblock.com/post/in-partnership-with-the-giving-block-brave-selects-the-tor-project-as-the-latest-grant-recipient-of <https://www.thegivingblock.com/post/in-partnership-with-the-giving-block-brave-selects-the-tor-project-as-the-latest-grant-recipient-of>
[3] https://twitter.com/brave/status/1191821841339318272 <https://twitter.com/brave/status/1191821841339318272>

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