From sdeibel at wingware.com Wed Sep 28 22:51:11 2005 From: sdeibel at wingware.com (Stephan Deibel) Date: Wed, 28 Sep 2005 16:51:11 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [PSF-Volunteers] Better fund raising for the PSF Message-ID: Hi, I would like to try to build a better fund raising capability for the PSF. While the PSF has done OK obtaining new sponsors by osmosis, and has done reasonably well through PyCon sponsorships, I think a manageable amount of additional effort could really increase our visibility as a worthy charitable organization. For example, we could send a semi-monthly news letter + appeal for donations to CLP, we could seek out potential corporate donors more agressively, we could make recommendations to the board on how to restructure available sponsor/donor opportunities to make those more attractive, we could start a recurring donor program and/or send solicitations to past donors say 2X/year, and so forth. In the past year, we've started our grants program (with some success, tho projects are still going on), we've funded a website redesign (which I hope will soon get over the deployment hump), and of course we continue to be the money bag behind PyCon which may in future years require increasingly larger $ commitments from the PSF. So there are certainly compelling reasons to donate to the PSF. Are there people on this list that are interested *and able* to help with any of this? I should note that the PSF has the Python Support Committee (PSC) that is chartered to work on this kind of thing, but it has done nothing recently and there appears to be no interest or time available among its current members to work on this. My intention as chairman of that committee is to reform it with a fresh pool of volunteers, if some can be found here. Thanks! Stephan Deibel Chairman of the Board Python Software Foundation http://python.org/psf