[tor-project] August Fundraising Report

[Sarah Stevenson]

Hello Tor world. Here is the Fundraising team’s report for August. As always, let us know if you have any questions.

## Events
We ran our first booth at DEF CON in August. It was an exhausting few days, but we exceeded our goal and raised over $43,000! We also made several connections with folks who want to help us with projects in the coming months. We have compiled lessons learned and are looking forward to attending again next year.

## Appeals
The Bug Smash campaign[1] ran from August 1 to August 31. We raised a little over $86K across postal mail, social media, email appeal, and in-person gifts at DEF CON and CCCamp. We received a mixture of currencies, including a variety of cryptocurrencies. This a strong increase over August 2018 when we raised $13K.

## Grants
We submitted a grant to RIPE NCC Community Project’s support program for 50,000 EUR to improve our IPv6 support. Thanks to teor, Nick, & Gaba for their help writing this proposal.

We submitted a concept note to OTF for a large Tor Browser project which would move us away from the ESR cycle and onto Mozilla’s regular release cycle; it would also allow us to implement some of Firefox’s Enhanced Tracking Protection features. Thanks to the Browser team and Pili for making this happen!

We found out that two of our grant requests were declined, one to NLnet for ESR migration and the other to the Deer Creek Foundation for Communications work.

Upcoming grant requests:
DRL SOIs for Community and Scalability, due 9/20
MOSS Scalability project, due 9/?? (rolling)
NLnet, due 10/1
Herb Block Foundation, due 10/3
NSF Dark Decoys project, due ?? (rolling)

## Cryptocurrency
We made a connection with a company called The Giving Block[2] that helps nonprofits accept cryptocurrency donations called. We are now listed on their website and will participate in their Giving Tuesday efforts this coming December. We are also discussing other ways to collaborate.

## Monthly Donors
We continue to see growth in our monthly donor program, Defenders of Privacy. In August we received $5,386.75 from this group. As you can see in the chart below, our efforts to recognize and communicate with these donors has resulted in more stable income and less attrition. We should expect the group to continue to grow through the end of the year and then have a dip again in January when people tend to reassess their monthly commitments.


[1] https://blog.torproject.org/tors-bug-smash-fund-help-tor-smash-all-bugs <https://blog.torproject.org/tors-bug-smash-fund-help-tor-smash-all-bugs>
[2] https://www.thegivingblock.com/donate-bitcoin <https://www.thegivingblock.com/donate-bitcoin>


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