Pledge drive planning

This page is for planning around our current DavisWiki / LocalWiki pledge drive!

Farmers Market Tabling

We're doing some Farmers Market Tabling which helps basic DavisWiki outreach and also helps spread the word about our pledge drive. Saturdays seem to be pretty well covered, but if anyone wants to step up and table Wednesdays, that'd be great!

Other Fundraising Events

See the Pledge Events page for additional information on the following events:

KevinWan of Sophia's has agreed to host a fundraising event! The Wiki will get a portion of proceeds from both the bar and the restaurant on Wednesday, September 1st, from 5pm until closing.
Rominger West Winery will be hosting an auction, on Thursday, September 9th. If you have spiffy items you'd like to donate for the auction, swing on by the Auction Item Donations page and let us know!

Business pledge asks / in-kind donation asks

We should hit up local businesses asking for pledges or in-kind donations we can use. Non-money donations can be raffled off at a large event.

GDoc - List of Orgs/Businesses to Ask For Pledges, Who's Asking Who and Status

Folks are working on fliers & pitch now, to sign up for asking see the above list. Anyone who wants to go do face-to-face fundraising should talk to another volunteer to practice their pitch.

Print Media [IMPORTANT]

Sacramento News & Review
Sac Bee
Davis Enterprise
The Aggie (Contact the managing editor)

More Places to Fundraise

-On other city's wikis via Wikispot? While it might not pan out, we just might snag another non-profit that wants to bring LocalWiki to their city. Philip is in the process of contacting these folks
-Davis Community Network (http://www2.dcn.org/davis/) likes dwiki, do they have the funds to back us up?
-Davis Downtown Business Association
-Farmer's Market itself

Things We Need

-Ideas for pledge rewards
-To finish the informational fliers, including small stacks for display in stores.
-Statistics about the DavisWiki
-List of businesses
-Ideas (leave below)
-$25,000

Comments:

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I plan to donate! Page successful ! Daubert
I also wouldn't be opposed to tabling, or business

Currently, the list of donors is quite long. To encourage businesses to donate, how about using a 2-column format on the donors page: personal donors and business donors? If we have a "Special thanks to our donors" link on the front page for a while, with a link to the donors, I think businesses will like the front page attention.

Another thought would be to have some sort of front page thank you message which randomly highlights on business donor. A line with something like "X businesses in Davis have donated, including (randomly generated): (RandomBusiness). Why not drop by and thank them?" For a business, knowing that it's going to pop up on the front page with a special thank you for 1 in X visitors will probably be a pretty big incentive, especially if we can provide them with some numbers for unique daily/weekly/monthly visitors. We'd probably want to establish some sort of timeframe for how long the thank-you is going to remain on the front page, e.g. 6 or 12 months after the completion of the pledge drive. Note that if we did that, we'd want separate personal and business donors pages, both incorporated into the donors page as includes. —TomGarberson

2010-07-26 10:17:43 After sleeping on it, I think we can talk about a particular business or organization's page without looking like "we're taking protection money". Showing them the page is going to highlight how connected they are to the project and how it has benefited them in the past. I think it helps a possible big talking point of: LocalWiki is good for small business. It levels the playing field between big brands and mom-and-pop stores using local wisdom and consumer feedback to trump flashy PR.
Second, I suppose a direct benefit whether they donate or not would be the improvement of the software, right?

Third, there's the "thanking" part. This troubles me but it seems necessary. How can we publicly thank contributing businesses without coming across like advertising? I think people trust the DavisWiki to be objective, so can we put thank-you's on the front page? I think we have to, whether we like it or not.

I like what TomGarberson is saying provided it not just be businesses, but maybe a certain level of funding (300?, 500?) that gets to be one of three randomly thanked in the top banner with a link to a hierarchical list of donors. More than $500? We need to pick one figure and stick to it, and pick a time frame as well. I say $300 and 6 months. —Darach

$500 or more and a front page thank you (perhaps randomly rotated) with no promise for a duration (eg we don't say three months, could be just during pledge drive and a bit after) is totally not shady- it's smart.

The issue I have with showing them their page (unprompted) is that they already know about the wiki. So it would be better to show them other things (maybe have a laptop there to show them different pages).

I think at this point we should draft up a for-organization info flyer and a set of "what to say when approaching an organization" document —PhilipNeustrom

2010-07-26 12:34:26 Once we get a flyer and decide on the details of the acknowledgments and whatnot, is it worth meeting in person to hammer out a bit of a pitch? —TomGarberson

Yeah, I think it'd be valuable to have a little in-person meetup to hammer out some details. I can potentially head up to Davis this weekend if we can organize a group of people to get together

2010-07-26 18:35:25 For the dance parties, we should see if we can find businesses that will match donations up to X amount (say, $20 per person, or up to $1000 max, or something like that). —TomGarberson

2010-07-26 20:16:49 Sounds good to me Philip. Does anyone know who we can talk to about statistics for DavisWiki, like page views or unique visitors?

Also, once we have that meeting to talk about contacting businesses, I'd like to start actually contacting businesses. But we can talk about that more. —Darach

2010-07-27 15:30:34 IMO... we should not offer front page attention to donors of a certain level... it will in turn make the wiki like any other paid directory. All donors get recognition or none. —Aaron.Curtin

I still tend to lean toward randomly selecting from a list. We could do one list each for individuals/families and businesses, and each time you load the front page it'll randomly select one person/family and one business to thank. Both equality and front-page exposure. —tg

2010-07-29 11:37:06 Yeah, but if you don't have a high minimum like $300 or something, they could just throw down $20 and call it a day. Unless you also post how much they donated, then that might provide motivation to donate more.

It doesn't become a paid directory because this is temporary and non-recurrent. The money's not going towards DavisWiki directly, but mainly to other wikis via LocalWiki. —Darach

2010-08-05 23:44:30 Wouldn't you prefer to get $20 from a lot of people rather than pressure a few into giving larger sums... kinda rubbing me the wrong way Darach. Don't get me wrong, I LOVE daviswiki and would love to see other communities have something like it, but to force me to donate more than I'm willing just because someone else (ie a friend or competitor) did, just seems so against what I feel daviswiki normally tries to promote. IDK, just feels weird, kinda like saying, "Oh, look at that guy, he's so great 'cause he gave DW $500, but oh look that guy on the bottom only gave $50. Man what a douche, he coulda/shoulda given more." Main reason I'm still hesitant on donating. —Aaron.Curtin

Heh Darach and I were replying at the exact same time. My understanding is slightly different from his; hopefully Philip can drop in and clear it up. We discussed the best way to thank donors last week, and my impression was that the Front Page will thank a random set of a few donors, without ranking them. It will pull names from three different pools of donors, based on the amount donated. I'm not sure of the exact amounts, but for the sake of illustration let's say we've got group A) $1-99; group B) $100-299; and group C) $300+. Each time it's loaded, the front page will pull (again, don't know the exact numbers, just doing an illustrative example) 2 names from group A, 1 or 2 names from group B, and 2 names from group C as examples of our many super cool donors. As far as I know, they won't be listed as being in group A, B, or C, at least on the front page. The names of donors who donate more will show up more often because they're being pulled from a smaller pool. —TomGarberson
I wrote a long response, but — check out what we throw up in a day or two on the front page. It's going to be really simple (no pledge amounts listed). If you think it's shady or pressure-inducing, let us all know. —PhilipNeustrom

2010-08-06 13:36:27 Yeah, good point. I was initially frustrated because of the urgency of the drive and that $15000/$100 per is a lot fewer contributors than $15000/$20 per contributors. There's only so many people or organizations who are willing to contribute and we're a little pressed for time, but I shouldn't let that get to me.

We had a good talk at Delta about this kind of thing and how to break it down. We're not putting donation amounts on there but we're still going to bracket it kinda like on: http://localwiki.org/ . Speaking of which does anyone have the notes up yet? Or those fliers?

I'm printing out letters and taking them around, I'll see if I can stop by and talk with you. —Darach

2010-08-23 13:32:22 As far as the pledge drive being all-or-nothing, what will happen to the money generated by the auction if the $25,000 goal is not met? —ScottMeehleib

Good question. If the pledge goal is not reached, the donors do not get charged anything and we do not get anything. Really important to raise the full amount. —MikeIvanov