[tor-project] March Fundraising Report

[Sarah Stevenson]

Hello! First off, we want to send light, love, and health to you all! Please reach out to us for any reason - especially with any suggestions or questions about our fundraising roadmap.

## COVID-19 and Fundraising

Nonprofit organizations across the globe are seeing a downturn in donations from individuals. Many donors are ending their automatic recurring donations. We, too, saw some decrease in donations from individuals in the month of March. Outside of the EOY campaign, we see an average of around $600 per day donated through the website. In March, the daily average was $468. This is not too dramatic a drop, but it will affect our revenue if the decline continues. We are brainstorming ways to reach out to current and potential donors and minimize the effects.

Our Defenders of Privacy (monthly donors) are sticking with us to a large extent. We normally see a decline in income from monthly donors in the first few months of each year, and this year is no different. We actually had a growth of almost $200 from February to March, with a total of $7,796 of income from this group of now 721 loyal donors. We are hoping our efforts to invite donors each month will lead to this program growing throughout the year, despite the uncertainty in the world.

## Grant Proposals

DRL: At the beginning of March we submitted two full proposals to DRL, one for a scalability project and one for a usability project in partnership with two subgrantees, Tails and Guardian Project. We will know more about whether or not these projects are accepted later this year.

OTF: Also at the beginning of March, we submitted a third revision of our OTF Tor Browser project. The proposal was accepted! Thank you to Matt, GeKo, & Pili who all worked tirelessly to help write and revise this proposal.

craigslist Charitable Fund: We submitted a short application to CCF for general operating funds.

Omidyar: We made an informal submission and we were declined.

We have also been doing some informal outreach to foundation prospects, none of which has led to formal applications, but are steps to building relationships and determining whether or not we are a good fit for different opportunities.

## Cultivation

We spent time connecting with current funders and major donors in the context of COVID-19. We sent informal check-ins and then followed up by sharing the blog post about remote work and personal safety[1] with each program officer and major donor.

## Events

We decided in early March to cancel the in-person happy hour we had been planning to host at EFF. We converted the event to a virtual happy hour on March 26th. We didn’t get as many attendees as we had hoped, but we received positive feedback from those who did take the time to attend. Isabela talked about the organizational side of Tor and Roger went into more technical detail. Cindy Cohn attended and talked about Tor’s need for contributions from individuals and asked each attendee to become a Champion of Privacy, if they were not a member of the giving group already. We have followed up with each of the attendees and shared the recording with those who did not attend.

We had been offered a complimentary sponsorship of Bitcoin2020 in San Francisco, but the event was postponed. We are hoping to be able to participate when it is rescheduled in Q3.

[1] https://blog.torproject.org/remote-work-personal-safety <https://blog.torproject.org/remote-work-personal-safety>



Sarah Stevenson (she/her)
Fundraising Director
The Tor Project
sstevenson at torproject.org


Public Key: 93B3 AC08 4257 FA3D D4BB  8E95 CC08 5DBA C015 612A



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