[Debian-sponsors-discuss] What problems are we trying to solve?

[Raphaël Walther]

Hi Brian,

I didn't take part to the discussion so far but I think it is a
worthwile discussion to have.

On Wed, May 29, 2013 at 04:51:55PM -0400, Brian Gupta wrote:
> - Current fundraising methods for DebConf are about as labor intensive
> as they could possibly be (bgupta)

For those who were not involved, we used a text file with git and a
weekly meeting to coordinate our efforts.

Here the page with the process we have used so far:
https://wiki.debconf.org/wiki/Fundraising

Well, it could be worse (we could use fax :)). I agree that current
methods are far from perfect. When we started the sponsorship team last
year I had the impression that we started from scratch. I guess it is
the same each year.

Apparently, we lost the contacts details or the contact person who made
the deal with sponsors from year to year. I think that it will be easier
next year to contact the DebConf sponsors 2013.

Regarding git, I have been told we shouldn't change that tool because it
the one which enable you to work offline. But it is not so great when
you have to know how many sponsors did we contact already ( I had to go
trough the whole 4000 lines table because we didn't contact all our
sponsors in the table, that was a nightmare, it tooks me a couple of
days to figure out). That why I am still convinced we should
look for another tool like a CRM. I am sure there is one dedicated for
fundraising somewhere.

> - Lack of project wide unity in approaching and recognizing sponsors (bgupta)
> - Not a huge amount of continuity on fundraising teams (bgupta)
> - Little recurring revenue streams (bgupta)

Should we have a global sponsorship team ?  The team would merge yearly
with a local sponsorship DebConf team to run a specific campaign for
DebConf.

Cheers,
Raphaël
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