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

[Brian Gupta]

On Thu, May 30, 2013 at 8:11 AM, Raphaël Walther
<raphael.walther at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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.

Yes, the big problem is that activity on debconf-sponsors-team, is
high when we NEED to be raising funds, which is a terrible time to
contemplate and implement anything other than trivial workflow
changes.

>> - 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.

I strongly believe the answer is yes. We'd probably still look to have
two mailing lists though, as the nature of the discussions will be
different, but my believe is that it should be one team. I think we'd
also want to include people who work on HW sponsorships and other
in-kind sponsorships as well to make sure efforts are coordinated, and
all sponsors are recognized by the project.

> Cheers,
> Raphaël
>
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