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List:       kde-community
Subject:    Re: Fundraising in KDE
From:       Boudewijn Rempt <boud () valdyas ! org>
Date:       2020-09-23 9:10:30
Message-ID: 3551911.kQq0lBPeGt () boud-thinkpad-t470p
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Ha, cool! I hadn't thought of this when I started thinkg we should copy blender's dev \
fund for Krita. I basically always look at what blender is doing to see whether it \
would fit for Krita. Here are some notes:

On Wednesday, 23 September 2020 00:53:34 CEST Carl Schwan wrote:

> I believe there is an even more important steep before, finding the money to
> pay the developers. The current incomes of the e.V. are €183.883 while the \
> expense is €258.851. No need to be good in maths to understand that we are losing \
> money. This is normal because we were hoarding too much money for a long time \
> without spending it, but this is still not a sustainable situation and if we start
> paying developers we will need to find even more money.

Currently, for Krita we get about 3,000 euros a month in donations. We have about \
300,000 downloads from the website in a month, which means we get about a euro for \
every thousand downloads. We get about 18,000 euros through sales on steam and in the \
Windows store, which is what is actually paying for the core team. I've also made \
money for Krita through NRE funding from Intel, but that source of income has stopped \
(and besides, we were usually losing money on it.)

> Many thanks to all these wonderful people donating money to the e.V. but this
> is unfortunately not enough and if we want to start paying developers we will
> need to change our fundraising strategy radically.
> 
> One of the reasons why we don't raise as many funds as we could is because of
> the failure of our recurring donation system. When the money raised through the
> one-time donation system increase by 50% in just one year, the recurring
> donation system lost 10% of its donors at the same time.

Krita is losing recurring donations at a much faster rate than usual since the \
beginning of august. People really are looking into their subscriptions at the \
moment, which is totally understandable.  
> Currently, we are using CiviCRM as our donation system, CiviCRM is a Customer
> Relationship Management for non-profit and non-governmental groups. CiviCRM
> is a complex web application and has many features for non-profit, we are
> currently using the CiviContribute extension to manage the recurrent donations.

We couldn't make civicrm work either... Despite hiring consultants.

<...>

> Because of this, I experimented with a new system based on the Blender Fund
> project. Blender Fund was developed by Blender devs and allowed Blender to
> raise enough money to employ many Blender devs to work full time on Blender.
> This allowed Blender to become a leading 3D creation suite. See
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jcl3--cbULk. Blender Fund is licensed under
> GPL and is based on Django.
> 
> A demo of my proposed system can be found here: https://fund.carlschwan.eu/
> and the repo https://invent.kde.org/websites/fund-krita-org. A nice thing
> about the system is that it is easy to switch the skin for other projects
> (e.g. https://krita-fund.carlschwan.eu).
> 
> An interesting feature is that it is already integrated with the future
> replacement of KDE Identity (code name MyKDE). So you can already login in to
> these demos using your KDE Identity credentials. Another feature is that donators
> get a badge that they can display on their profile page in MyKDE.
> 
> You can also try to subscribe to payment using this fake credit card:
> 4111111111111111 with an expiration date in the future and play around.

Yay!

> 
> I strongly believe that this can be a part of the solution, but just a part
> of the solution. We also need to change our messaging and make our goals more
> clear. These are a social problem and not a technical one ;)

Yes, messaging -- for Blender it's easy because there are many companies funding them \
for whom blender is a complement that replaces expensive alternatives. It's different \
for KDE, so that needs good thinking.

Also... Just like Blender, KDE probably needs to setup a second legal entity that can \
fund freelance developers for certain projects or even outright hire them. 

> Please let me know if this is worth putting more effort into it or if the current
> system is good enough. I feel like this should be a community decision, since
> fundraising is everyone's concern. Also, any help is welcome :)

Well, obviously, I'm all for it :-)

-- 
https://www.krita.org


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