[tor-project] July Fundraising Report

[Sarah Stevenson]

Hello Tor world! The Fundraising team was quite busy in July. Please reach out if you have any questions.

## Cryptocurrency

As we mentioned last month, BTCPayServer ran a two-week long campaign[1] for us that involved social media posts and mentions on a podcast[2]. The campaign reached the $10,000 goal in 25 hours[3] and raised a total of $18,892.34. We are very grateful to the BTCPayServer team who made this campaign easy for us to implement and a great success.

## Monthly Giving

In July we raised $4,774.81 from 418 monthly donors. Since April we have gained 118 monthly donors. This increase can be attributed to the banner on Tor Browser and monthly rolling invites to one-time donors. We offered all current monthly donors the patch[4] designed by Antonela and people were excited and grateful to receive the gift.

## Strategy

The ‘money machine’ members spread out to attend as many sessions as possible in Stockholm. We then spent our roadmapping session plotting out the grants we plan to apply to in the coming months and discuss which teams’ work can be included in each proposal.

Media Democracy Fund, a current sponsor, generously offered to pay for the time of a strategic fundraising consultant to help us formalize our fundraising plan for the 2019-2020 fiscal year. The fundraising team traveled to Washington DC for a full-day strategic session at the end of July.

During this session we talked about making fundraising projections that more accurately account for risk, which will help us create more realistic (thus achievable) annual budgets. We also discussed how to strategically approach major donors from prospecting to cultivation to asking for a gift, how to craft messaging specifically for donors, and how to better allocate the staff capacity of the fundraising and adjacent teams.

## Grants

Al helped the Guardian Project team to begin writing a grant proposal for support of the linguine project, but this has not yet been submitted.

We submitted a request to the Glaser Progress Foundation for $25,000 to support the Community team.

Part of our focus on the fundraising team is to stay in more consistent contact with our sponsors/donors. We want them to know what we’re doing, how we’re stewarding their gifts/completing their projects, and to see how their projects are interconnected. We sent this post-Stockholm meeting newsletter[5] to current sponsors, then sent a version to major donors, and then published it as a blog post[6] for all.

Upcoming requests:
RIPE NCC for improving Tor’s IPv6 support, due 9/1
OTF Core Infrastructure grant for Tor Browser, due 9/1
DRL SOIs for Community and Scalability, due 9/20
MOSS Scalability project, due 9/?? (rolling)

## Individual Giving

We continue to grow our monthly income from individuals visiting donate.torproject.org. In July the daily average of non-monthly gifts donated was up 315% over July 2018. This increase can be attributed to the new website, increased awareness about Tor, and the welcome emails we send to newsletter subscribers.

[1]https://bitcoinfortor.torproject.net <https://bitcoinfortor.torproject.net/>
[2]https://stephanlivera.com/episode/89/ <https://stephanlivera.com/episode/89/>
[3]https://cointelegraph.com/news/tor-projects-bitcoin-crowdfunding-campaign-hits-goal-in-25-hrs <https://cointelegraph.com/news/tor-projects-bitcoin-crowdfunding-campaign-hits-goal-in-25-hrs>
[4]https://tinyurl.com/yysrlnps <https://tinyurl.com/yysrlnps>
[5]https://crm.torproject.org/civicrm/mailing/view?id=267 <https://crm.torproject.org/civicrm/mailing/view?id=267>
[6]https://blog.torproject.org/reflections-our-stockholm-all-hands <https://blog.torproject.org/reflections-our-stockholm-all-hands>
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