This was extracted (@ 2024-04-17 21:10) from a list of minutes
which have been approved by the Board.
Please Note
The Board typically approves the minutes of the previous meeting at the
beginning of every Board meeting; therefore, the list below does not
normally contain details from the minutes of the most recent Board meeting.
WARNING: these pages may omit some original contents of the minutes.
Meeting times vary, the exact schedule is available to ASF Members and Officers, search for "calendar" in the Foundation's private index page (svn:foundation/private-index.html).
1) ASF Sponsors: a --No new Sponsors were onboarded at this time. We are working with three organizations seeking to become ASF Sponsors. b --Renewals: one Platinum Sponsor has confirmed their renewal. c --Payments: 1 --New: we received no new Sponsor payments. 2a --Renewing: we received renewal payments from one Platinum, one Gold, one Silver, and one Bronze Sponsor. 2b --Incoming: we await payment from two renewing Platinum, three renewing Gold, one new Silver, and one renewing Bronze Sponsor. 2) Targeted Sponsors: we are renewing a Bronze Targeted Sponsor as well as reviewing a potential Targeted Sponsor’s proposed support for an Apache project and its community. 3) Sponsor Relations: we have been focusing our Sponsor outreach on identifying and engaging with new Sponsor points-of-contact, as well as providing updates on ASF events that include Community Over Code. 4) Event Sponsorship: we are overseeing the contractual/invoicing aspects of Community Over Code sponsorships and also liaising with Marketing & Publicity and Conferences teams on some sponsor requests involving conference benefits and promotional opportunities. 5) Individual Donations and Corporate Giving: we received $18K in online donations via https://donate.apache.org/ , which included one repeat corporate contribution. 6) Administrivia: we are making good progress with the Treasury and Accounting teams on resolving some Sponsor invoicing issues.
1) ASF Sponsors: a --New: we recognized two corporate contributors as new Bronze Sponsors. b --Renewals: we have confirmed renewals from one Platinum, one Silver, and one Bronze Sponsor. c --Payments: 1 --New: we received payment from a new Silver Sponsor. 2a --Renewing: we received one Gold, two Silver and three Bronze Sponsor renewal payments. 2b --Incoming: we await payment from two renewing Platinum, four renewing Gold, two renewing Silver, and one renewing Bronze Sponsor. 2) Targeted Sponsors: we are discussing donation processes and options with two potential new Targeted sponsors. 3) Sponsor Relations: ongoing Sponsor engagement with both ASF (paid) and Targeted (in-kind) Sponsors continues, with focus on identifying and forging new connections with those Sponsors whose ASF points-of-contact have left the organization. We are also discussing 2024 philanthropic giving budgets and corporate contribution strategies with select Sponsors. 4) Event Sponsorship: we are promoting all three Community Over Code events (Europe, Asia, and North America) to our Sponsors, including the combined event sponsorship prospectus for Europe and North America’s events, for which we are onboarding new sponsors. 5) Individual Donations and Corporate Giving: we received $1,225 in online donations via https://donate.apache.org/ during this timeframe. 6) Administrivia: we continue to liaise closely with the Treasury and Accounting teams on a few remaining Sponsor invoicing issues as well as reconcile a Targeted Sponsor’s donation allocations.
1) ASF Sponsors: a --New: we onboarded two new Bronze Sponsors during this timeframe. b --Renewals: we have confirmed renewals from two Platinum, two Gold, three Silver, and five Bronze Sponsors. c --Payments: 1 --New: we received no new Sponsor payments during this time, however, we received two corporate contributions, each equivalent to a Bronze sponsorship, and will be recognizing the organizations as such. One new Silver sponsor’s payment had been returned due to a processing glitch and will be re-submitted in January. 2a --Renewing: we received two Bronze Sponsor renewal payments. 2b --Incoming: we await payment from two renewing Platinum, five renewing Gold, three renewing Silver, two new Silver Sponsors, and three renewing Bronze Sponsors. 2) Targeted Sponsors: we are working on renewing a Targeted Sponsor, and are engaging with a potential new Silver Targeted sponsor. 3) Sponsor Relations: end-of-year is often our most active time for Sponsor engagement with both ASF (paid) and Targeted (in-kind) Sponsors. We continue to update and form new connections with Sponsors whose ASF points-of-contact are no longer with the organizations. 4) Event Sponsorship: we are promoting the Community Over Code/Europe CFP and 2024 combined event sponsorship prospectus. We are onboarding new sponsors for both events and continue to pursue the final outstanding sponsorship payment issue from ApacheCon NA 2022. 5) Individual Donations and Corporate Giving: we received $18.5K in online donations via https://donate.apache.org/ during this timeframe, which includes $15K in corporate contributions (two of whom will be receiving Bronze Sponsorship recognition). 6) Administrivia: we are working closely with the Treasury and Accounting teams on a few remaining Sponsor invoicing issues as well as unifying the ASF’s presence and compliance requirements with third party donation platforms and programs. We are also discussing strategic approaches towards expectations from sponsors from different geographic locations, and formalizing ways for PMCs to support their contributors who are receiving third-party financial support for their contributions (actual relationships and transactions all lie outside of ASF Sponsorship).
1) ASF Sponsors: a --New: we onboarded one new Silver and one new Bronze Sponsor during this timeframe. b --Renewals: one Gold Sponsor and one Silver Sponsor have confirmed their renewal. c --Payments: 1 --New: we received no new Sponsor payments during this time 2a --Renewing: we received one Gold Sponsor renewal payment. 2b --Incoming: we await payment from two renewing Gold, two renewing Silver, and one new Silver Sponsor. 2) Targeted Sponsors: we are onboarding a new Targeted Sponsor, and have confirmed two Platinum Targeted sponsor renewals during this time. 3) Sponsor Relations: Sponsor outreach and engagement continues with increased face-time as we approach the end of the year. We are also seeking new points-of-contact with some of our Sponsors who have implemented reductions in force. 4) Event Sponsorship: we are promoting the Community Over Code/Europe CFP and will be socializing the 2024 event sponsorship prospectus when available. We continue to pursue the final outstanding sponsorship payment from ApacheCon NA 2022. 5) Individual Donations and Corporate Giving: we launched this year’s Giving Tuesday and End-of-Year giving campaigns in collaboration with Marketing & Publicity. We received $3.16K in donations during this timeframe, which includes a $1K corporate contribution. 6) Administrivia: we are working closely with the Treasury and Accounting teams on a few remaining Sponsor invoicing issues.
1) ASF Sponsors: a --New: we onboarded one new Bronze Sponsor during this timeframe. b --Renewals: one Gold Sponsor has confirmed their renewal, but will be downgrading to the Silver level. c --Payments: 1 --New: we received payment for a new Bronze Sponsor. 2a --Renewing: we received payment from one renewing Platinum, one Gold, and two Bronze Sponsors. 2b --Incoming: we await payment from one Platinum, one Gold, and two Silver Sponsors. 2) Targeted Sponsors: no new Targeted Sponsors have been onboarded at this time. 3) Sponsor Relations: Sponsor outreach and engagement continues with monthly Sponsor-focused updates and facilitating any requests. We are also in discussions with a candidate Silver Sponsor. 4) Event Sponsorship: with Community Over Code/Halifax behind us, we are preparing to support 2024 event sponsorships, and are making progress on collecting the final outstanding sponsorship payment from ApacheCon NA 2022. 5) Individual Donations and Corporate Giving: we received $6K in donations during this timeframe. Of note, $35K in sponsorship payments were processed via our online donation payment platform, https://donate.apache.org/ 6) Administrivia: we continue to work closely with the Treasury and Accounting teams on a few remaining Sponsor invoicing issues.
A report was expected, but not received
1) ASF Sponsors: a --New: no new Sponsors were onboarded during this timeframe. b --Renewals: one Gold Sponsor has confirmed their renewal. c --Payments: 1 --New: no new Sponsor payments were received. 2a --Renewing: we received payment from one renewing Gold Sponsor. 2b --Incoming: we await payment from one Platinum, one Gold, one Silver, and one Bronze Sponsor. 2) Targeted Sponsors: we are in the process of onboarding a new Platinum Targeted Sponsor. 3) Sponsor Relations: Sponsor engagement continues, including dispatching our monthly news updates. We are helping organize Sponsor meetings, both virtually as well as one-on-one at the upcoming Community Over Code/Halifax event in October. 4) Event Sponsorship: we received payment for the proceeds from ApacheCon Asia 2022. We continue to liaise event sponsorship activities, including coordinating with Community Over Code/North America 2023 sponsorships and Europe 2024 planners, as well as assisting with collections on final outstanding sponsorship payments from ApacheCon NA (October 2022). 5) Individual Donations and Corporate Giving: we received $15.6K in donations this month, which includes one corporate contribution. 6) Administrivia: we continue to work with the Treasury and Accounting teams on the few remaining outstanding Sponsor invoicing issues.
1) ASF Sponsors: a --New: no new Sponsors were onboarded during this timeframe. b --Renewals: one Gold Sponsor has confirmed their renewal. c --Payments: 1 --New: no new Sponsor payments were received. 2a --Renewing: we received payment from one renewing Gold and one Bronze Sponsor. 2b --Incoming: we await payment from one Platinum, one Gold, and two Silver Sponsors. 2) Targeted Sponsors: no changes with our Targeted Sponsors have taken place during this timeframe. 3) Sponsor Relations: VP Sponsor Relations presented to a Gold Sponsor's global data team interested in expanding their participation in the ASF. We have prepared speaking points and communications tools for those seeking to spread the word on ways to support the ASF, and are working with VP Marketing & Publicity to engage the greater ASF community. We continue to issue our Sponsor monthly news updates, and have included the new VP Public Affairs role and blog post on the EU Cyber Resilience Act. 4) Event Sponsorship: we are liaising 2023 event sponsorship activities, and continue to assist with collections on several outstanding sponsorship payments from ApacheCon NA (October 2022). 5) Individual Donations and Corporate Giving: we received $1K in individual donations during July. 6) Administrivia: we continue to work with the Treasury and Accounting teams on a number of outstanding Sponsor invoicing issues.
1) ASF Sponsors: a --New: we have welcomed a new Silver Sponsor. b --Renewals: two Gold and one Silver Sponsor have confirmed their renewal. One Silver Sponsor has stated their inability to renew for the upcoming sponsorship year. c --Payments: 1 --New: no new Sponsor payments were received. 2a --Renewing: we received payment from one renewing Platinum, one Gold, and one Silver Sponsor. 2b --Incoming: we await payment from one Platinum, one Gold, one Silver, and one Bronze Sponsor. 2) Targeted Sponsors: no changes with our Targeted Sponsors have taken place during this timeframe. 3) Sponsor Relations: we are liaising introductions with a Gold Sponsor seeking select ASF community speakers for an internal event. We are preparing speaking points and communications tools to help spread the word on ways to support the ASF, and are also connecting with Sponsor contacts who are new to the ASF community/ecosystem. Our Sponsor monthly news updates include project release highlights and event deadlines and opportunities (e.g., CFP and sponsorship). 4) Event Sponsorship: we have guided ASF Sponsors to the prospectus for the upcoming Community Over Code conference(s), and are liaising 2023 event sponsorship activities. We continue to assist with collections on several outstanding sponsorship payments from ApacheCon NA (October 2022). 5) Individual Donations and Corporate Giving: we received $1.8K in individual donations this month. 6) Administrivia: we are working with the Treasury and Accounting teams on a few outstanding Sponsor invoicing issues, as well as review/correct some reporting inconsistencies.
1) ASF Sponsors: a --New: we’re in the process of onboarding a new Silver Sponsor. b --Renewals: one Silver Sponsor has confirmed their renewal. One Gold Sponsor has confirmed they are unable to renew this year. c --Payments: 1 --New: no new Sponsor payments were received. 2a --Renewing: we received payment from two renewing Platinum, two Gold, one Silver, and one Bronze Sponsor. 2b --Incoming: we await payment from one Platinum, one Gold, one Silver, and one Bronze Sponsor. 2) Targeted Sponsors: we are exploring additional ways to support the ASF through the Targeted Sponsorship program. No changes with our Targeted Sponsors during this timeframe. 3) Sponsor Relations: we met with the OSPO heads of two Sponsor organizations. We are discussing options to augment Sponsor communications and engagement at events to better connect with Sponsor contacts who are new to the ASF community/ecosystem. 4) Event Sponsorship: a handful of ASF Sponsors await the prospectus for the upcoming Community Over Code Conference(s). We are standing by to support 2023 event sponsorship activities and continue to assist with collections on several outstanding sponsorship payments from ApacheCon NA (October 2022). 5) Individual Donations and Corporate Giving: we received $2.7K in individual donations this month. 6) Administrivia: we continue to work with the Treasury and Accounting teams on resolving a few remaining Sponsor invoicing issues.
1) ASF Sponsors: a --New: no new Sponsors were onboarded during this timeframe. b --Renewals: one Gold Sponsor has confirmed their renewal. c --Payments: 1 --New: no new Sponsor payments were received. 2 --Renewing: we received payment from one renewing Platinum, one Gold, and one Bronze Sponsor. 2a --Incoming: we await payment from three Platinum, two Gold, two Silver, and three Bronze Sponsors. 2) Targeted Sponsors: we have had no changes with our Targeted Sponsors during this timeframe. 3) Sponsor Relations: we are in discussions with the new OSPO of a potential Sponsor. A candidate Sponsor preparing to onboard at the Silver level has dropped out due to a corporate-wide layoff. 4) Event Sponsorship: a handful of ASF Sponsors await the prospectus for the upcoming Community Over Code Conference(s). We continue to assist with collections on five outstanding sponsorship payments from ApacheCon NA. 5) Individual Donations and Corporate Giving: we received $13.4K in individual and one-time corporate donations, which includes a $10K corporate contribution. 6) Administrivia: we continue to work closely with the Treasurer and Accounting teams to resolve any outstanding Sponsor invoicing that may be hung up with new payment portal platforms, access, or processes.
1) ASF Sponsors: a --New: we welcomed two new Bronze Sponsors during this timeframe. b --Renewals: one Gold Sponsor has confirmed their renewal. c --Payments: 1 --New: we received payments from two new Bronze Sponsors. 2 --Renewing: we received payment from one renewing Platinum, two Gold, and one Bronze Sponsor. 2a --Incoming: we await payment from three Platinum, one Gold, two Silver, and four Bronze Sponsors. We await purchase orders to invoice two renewing Gold Sponsors. 2) Targeted Sponsors: we have welcomed a new Targeted Bronze Sponsor. 3) Sponsor Relations: we continue to spend effort engaging with current Sponsors’ new points-of-contact, particularly in light of widespread layoffs. We are preparing to onboard a new Silver Sponsor. Most (but not all) of our China-based Sponsors have confirmed their attrition due to the techno-trade challenges. 4) Event Sponsorship: a small handful of ASF Sponsors await the prospectus for the upcoming Community Over Code Conference. We are exploring possible integration between ASF and Events Sponsorship plans/benefits. We continue to assist Accounting with collections on a few outstanding sponsorship payments from ApacheCon NA. 5) Individual Donations and Corporate Giving: we received $12.2K in individual and one-time corporate donations, which included a separate corporate contribution from a Gold Sponsor. 6) Administrivia: we worked with a Gold Sponsor to unlock a renewal payment for the 2022 Sponsorship year. This has now been resolved and payment received. We continue to work closely with the Treasurer and Accounting teams in resolving outstanding Sponsor invoicing and payments issues. Work on optimizing the new Fundraising CMS is ongoing.
1) ASF Sponsors: a --New: no new Sponsors have been onboarded during this timeframe. b --Renewals: one Platinum and five Bronze Sponsors have confirmed their renewals. c --Payments: 1 --New: we have not received payments from new Sponsors at this time. 1a --Incoming: we await payment from one Bronze Sponsor. 2 --Renewing: we received payment from one renewing Gold, and one Silver Sponsor. 2a --Incoming: we await payment from three Platinum, one Gold, one Silver, and five Bronze Sponsors. We await a purchase order to invoice one renewing Silver Sponsor. 2) Targeted Sponsors: we have set up the in-kind invoicing for a renewing Targeted Platinum Sponsor. We are finalizing our annual Targeted Sponsor audit. 3) Sponsor Relations: outreach continues to engage with new Sponsor points-of-contact and ensure renewals are processed smoothly. Several of our China-based Sponsors have now responded regarding the techno-trade impact on future renewals. 4) Event Sponsorship: we await notice from members of the Conferences Planning committee regarding future events. We are helping with collections on a few outstanding sponsorship payments from ApacheCon NA. 5) Individual Donations and Corporate Giving: we received $22.1K in individual and one-time corporate donations, which included two repeat annual corporate contributions. 6) Administrivia: we are working with the Treasurer and Accounting teams to resolve remaining Sponsor invoicing and payments issues. We continue to make progress with customizing the new Fundraising CMS.
1) ASF Sponsors: a --New: no new Sponsors have been onboarded during this timeframe. b --Renewals: we received renewal confirmation from one Gold Sponsor. One Silver Sponsor has cancelled their renewal (originally committed in August 2022) due to US-China tech conflict. c --Payments: 1 --New: we received payment from one Platinum and one new Bronze Sponsor. 1a --Incoming: we await payment from one Bronze Sponsor. 2 --Renewing: we received payment from two renewing Gold, and one Silver Sponsor. 2a --Incoming: we await payment from two Platinum, two Gold, two Silver, and one Bronze Sponsor. We await purchase orders to formally invoice one Gold, and one Silver Sponsor. 2) Targeted Sponsors: we met with two Platinum Targeted Sponsors regarding their annual contributions to benefit ASF Infrastructure. We will begin our annual Targeted Sponsor audit, and are also exploring priorities for additional possible support for Infrastructure operations as well as Apache projects. 3) Sponsor Relations: due to increased movement with our Sponsor points-of-contact (both corporate restructuring as well as layoffs), we have been working to ensure that we are able to maintain active contact with our current Sponsors. Outreach continues with our China-based Sponsors regarding blocked emails as well as techno-trade impact on future renewals. 4) Event Sponsorship: no new events are scheduled to date. We continue to finalize collections on a few outstanding sponsorship payments from ApacheCon NA. 5) Individual Donations and Corporate Giving: we received $4K in individual and one-time corporate donations during January, which included a repeat annual corporate contribution. 6) Administrivia: the Treasurer was able to unlock a long-outstanding invoicing issue with a Silver Sponsor. We continue to work with the Treasurer and Accounting teams to resolve any remaining Sponsor invoicing and/or payments issues. We are making progress on the new Fundraising CMS, are handling some Sponsor benefit and donation method updates, and are also considering hiring an additional team member on a part-time basis.
1) ASF Sponsors: a --New: we welcomed one new Bronze Sponsor during this timeframe. b --Renewals: we received renewal confirmations from one Platinum Sponsor. One Gold Sponsor will be renewing at the Silver level. c --Payments: 1 --New: we received payment from one Platinum and one new Bronze Sponsor 1a --Incoming: we await payment from one Bronze Sponsor. We also await purchase a order to formally invoice one new Silver Sponsor. 2 --Renewing: we received payment from one renewing Platinum, one Gold, and one Bronze Sponsor 2a --Incoming: we await payment from one Platinum, five Gold, two Silver, and one Bronze Sponsor. We await purchase orders to formally invoice one Platinum, one Gold, and one Silver Sponsor. 2) Targeted Sponsors: we met with a Targeted Sponsor to review their contributions and provided a summary of their activities to date, as they enter their 7th year of supporting the ASF. We will be performing our annual Targeted Sponsor audit in January. 3) Sponsor Relations: ongoing outreach continues, including working with those Sponsors who needed to close out their budgets prior to the end of the calendar year. We rectified contacts with one Platinum and two Bronze Sponsors. We are also working with some China-based Sponsors regarding blocked emails as well as concerns/risks with Sponsorship renewal. 4) Event Sponsorship: no new events are taking place. A few ApacheCon NA sponsorship payments remain outstanding. 5) Individual Donations and Corporate Giving: we received $41.8K in individual and one-time corporate donations during December, which included renewal payments for one Silver and one Bronze Sponsor. We received contributions of $1K and higher from several repeat donors. 6) Administrivia: we continue to have an outstanding invoicing/payment issue with a Silver Sponsor. We are working with the Treasurer and Accounting teams to resolve.
Highlights during November 2022 -- 1) ASF Sponsors: a --New: we welcomed one new Gold Sponsor during this timeframe. b --Renewals: we received renewal confirmations from two Platinum, two Gold, and one Silver Sponsor. Two renewing Sponsors are downgrading their sponsorship levels for the 2023 sponsorship year: one Platinum Sponsor will be renewing at the Gold level, and a Gold Sponsor will be renewing at the Silver level. c --Payments: 1 --New: we received payment from one new Gold Sponsor 1a --Incoming: we await payment from one Platinum, one Gold, and one Bronze Sponsor. We also await purchase orders to formally invoice one new Silver Sponsor. 2 --Renewing: we received payment from two renewing Platinum and one Silver Sponsor 2a --Incoming: we await payment from one Platinum, five Gold, two Silver, and one Bronze Sponsor. We await purchase orders to formally invoice one Platinum and six Gold Sponsors. 2) Targeted Sponsors: a Platinum Targeted Sponsor is wishing us to meet with their new CEO to highlight the benefits of their Targeted Sponsorship, coinciding with their upcoming renewal for the 2023 Sponsorship year. 3) Sponsor Relations: we sent an “approaching the end of year” outreach email to all Sponsors, with select highlights on the ASF’s achievements, made possible through their financial support. Those Sponsors who responded were very appreciative; some had requested additional data, which we’ve been able to provide where possible. We will forward the FY2022 Annual Report when available. In addition to day-to-day outreach, we continue to work with the Treasurer and Accounting to resolve issues with a Silver Sponsor’s invoicing and payment processing. We met with two Sponsors who are considering upgrading their Sponsorship levels. We are also trying to work around ongoing issues with blocked emails with a small handful of Sponsors in China. 4) Event Sponsorship: no new events are taking place. A few ApacheCon NA sponsorship payments are still outstanding. 5) Individual Donations and Corporate Giving: we received $3.58K in individual and one-time corporate donations during November. November kicked off our end-of-year giving season, which included Giving Tuesday promotions with Marketing & Publicity. 6) Administrivia: after many months, we were finally able to invoice and onboard the vendor payment platform of a Platinum Sponsor. We have an outstanding similar issue with a Silver sponsor, and are working with Treasurer and Accounting teams to resolve.
1) ASF Sponsors: we are awaiting renewal payments from one Platinum Sponsor, three Gold Sponsors, three Silver Sponsors, and three Bronze Sponsors. We received renewal confirmations from two Platinum, two Gold, and one Silver Sponsor. One Platinum Sponsor has committed to renewing but is downgrading to the Gold level. We are awaiting payments from one new Gold, one new Silver, and one new Bronze Sponsor. 2) Targeted Sponsors: a Platinum Targeted Sponsor is seeking our participation in a promotional campaign. 3) Sponsor Relations: we met with several sponsors during ApacheCon. In addition to day-to-day outreach, we continue to work with two Sponsors to resolve issues with invoicing and payment processing. 4) Event Sponsorship: no new events are taking place. 5) Individual Donations and Corporate Giving: we received $2.26K in individual donations during October. We are preparing for end-of-year giving season (including Giving Tuesday) starting in November. 6) Administrivia: we are still unable to invoice and onboard the vendor payment platform of a Platinum Sponsor; this issue has been ongoing for several months. The same is now the case with a Silver sponsor.
1) ASF Sponsors: we have renewed one Silver Sponsor, signed on one new Gold Sponsor, and are onboarding two additional new Gold Sponsors. We’re awaiting renewal payments from one Platinum, one Gold, three Silver, and two Bronze Sponsors. We received new Sponsor payments from one Platinum and one Gold Sponsor, as well as renewal payments from two Bronze Sponsors, one of which had downgraded from the Silver level. 2) Targeted Sponsors: we are exploring new options for organizations to support the Foundation with in-kind support. 3) Sponsor Relations: work with select Sponsors to resolve issues with invoicing and payment processing continues. We will be meeting with some sponsor organizations during ApacheCon. 4) Event Sponsorship: sponsorships for ApacheCon North America were in place in advance of the event. 5) Individual Donations and Corporate Giving: we received $1.35K in individual donations during September, plus $4.5K in corporate contributions. We are working with M&P to prepare for Giving Tuesday at the end of November. 6) Administrivia: we are still unable to invoice and onboard the vendor payment platform of a Platinum Sponsor; this issue has been ongoing for several months.
1) ASF Sponsors: we have signed on one new Gold Sponsor and are in discussions with two additional Gold and one Silver candidate Sponsors. We’re awaiting renewal payments from one Platinum, one Gold, two Silver, and two Bronze Sponsors. We received new Sponsor payments from one Platinum and one Gold Sponsor, as well as renewal payments from one Platinum and one Silver Sponsor. 2) Targeted Sponsors: discussions continue regarding new ways for organizations to support the Foundation. 3) Sponsor Relations: we continue to work with select Sponsors to resolve issues with invoicing and payment processing. Ongoing engagement with candidate sponsor organizations, some of which go back to 2021. 4) Event Sponsorship: sponsorship operations for next month’s ApacheCon North America. 5) Individual Donations and Corporate Giving: we received $1.8K in individual donations during August, and are facilitating an incoming corporate contribution. 6) Administrivia: work continues with Treasury and Accounting teams to help expedite incoming payments by fine-tuning Sponsor invoicing and payment platform onboarding. Escalated fundraising proposals for security to operations meeting to discuss with management.
A report was expected, but not received
1) ASF Sponsors: we are in the invoicing process for one new Silver Sponsor and 3 renewing Gold Sponsors, and await renewal payments from 4 Platinum, 2 Silver, and 2 Bronze Sponsors. We cancelled invoices for 2 Bronze Sponsors due to non-payment, and received payment from one new Bronze Sponsor, as well as renewal payments from one Platinum, one Gold, and one Silver Sponsor. 2) Targeted Sponsors: no new activities have taken place over the past month. 3) Sponsor Relations: we onboarded a new Bronze Sponsor, liaised an accounting request from a Gold Sponsor, and continue to work closely with three Platinum Sponsors regarding issues with invoicing and payment processing. We are also identifying new primary points-of-contact with three Sponsors. 4) Event Sponsorship: ApacheCon North America sponsorships are in flight with no outstanding issues. 5) Individual Donations and Corporate Giving: we received $1.07K in donations during June. Mid-month the donation platform was hit by a bot and taken offline for diagnosis and mitigation. No new donations were accepted during this time, but repeat donations were successfully processed. We will be working with Infra to address additional backend items. 6) Administrivia: we continue working with the Accounting and Treasury teams to manage Sponsor payment issues. Progress continues with new CRM integration.
1) ASF Sponsors: we opened the new fiscal year with one Gold and one Silver Sponsor renewal, and are onboarding one new Silver Sponsor. We await new sponsorship and renewal payments for 4 Platinum and 5 Bronze Sponsors. We received payment from two Gold Sponsors, one of which had been outstanding since July due to a snag with invoice submission. 2) Targeted Sponsors: we are in discussions with an existing ASF Sponsor who is interested in supporting ASF Security efforts, and are also working with a PMC who is liaising with an organization interested in providing CDN services to support their project. 3) Sponsor Relations: we are working closely with three ASF Platinum Sponsors on resolving issues with invoicing and payment processing. 4) Event Sponsorship: ApacheCon North America sponsorships are in flight and proceeding smoothly. 5) Individual Donations and Corporate Giving: we received $2.4K in donations during May. 6) Administrivia: efforts continue to improve workflow processes with the Accounting and Treasury teams, including Sponsor payment followthrough and shared credential management. We are progressing with new CRM integration for Sponsor lifecycle management.
1) ASF Sponsors: we have signed on a new Platinum, Gold and Bronze Sponsor. We await new sponsorship and renewal payments for 4 Platinum, 2 Gold, and 5 Bronze Sponsors. We received payment from two Gold and one Bronze Sponsor. 2) Targeted Sponsors: ongoing process refinement regarding donations that benefit individual PMCs. 3) Sponsor Relations: we met with two existing ASF Platinum Sponsors and helped orient a Silver Sponsor’s new OSPO team. 4) Event Sponsorship: sponsorships for ApacheCon North America are in flight and ahead of projections. We collected payment for an outstanding sponsorship from 2021. 5) Individual Donations and Corporate Giving: we received $4.92K in individual donations in April. 6) Administrivia: we continue to fine-tune ways to improve workflow with the Accounting team, which enabled us to close out issues with a long-outstanding Sponsor payment. We are also beginning to use a new CRM solution for Sponsor lifecycle management.
1) ASF Sponsors: One Platinum level sponsor will not be renewing in July of this year. We have brought on a new Platinum Sponsor as well as a new Gold Sponsor. We anticipate new sponsorship and renewal payments for 2 Platinum, 3 Gold, and 3 Bronze Sponsors. We received payment from one Bronze Sponsor. 2) Targeted Sponsors: We are continuing to hone policies related to donations that benefit individual PMCs. 3) Sponsor Relations: We met with an existing ASF Platinum Sponsor who is augmenting their internal processes with Targeted donations. 4) Event Sponsorship: We pursued and have received payment for an ApacheCon sponsorship that has been outstanding since September. 5) Individual Donations and Corporate Giving: we received $2.6K in individual donations in February. 6) Administrivia: we continue to work on outstanding workflow/tasks with the Accounting team and are cleaning up loose ends with internal record keeping. We are working to reconcile our reported numbers with accounting and generate reports to support them. I plan on including these numbers in the next report. We are starting to enhance our sponsorship tracking by moving data into Salesforce.
1) ASF Sponsors: we have closed more than $1.86M in sponsorships in FY2022 thus far. Sponsorship activities continue, with a new Platinum Sponsor being onboarded, and a new Silver Sponsor welcomed. We anticipate new sponsorship and renewal payments for 2 Platinum, 3 Gold, 3 Silver, and 6 Bronze Sponsors. We received payment from one Platinum and two Silver Sponsors. 2) Targeted Sponsors: we are reviewing, renewing, and/or revising donated services with several Targeted Sponsors, as well as continuing to hone policies related to donations that benefit individual PMCs. 3) Sponsor Relations: we met with a new Sponsor point-of-contact, who was new to the Apache community and unfamiliar with the ASF. We will also be meeting with members of a Platinum Sponsor’s new OSPO team. 4) Event Sponsorship: fees for an ApacheCon sponsorship remain outstanding since September. 5) Individual Donations and Corporate Giving: we received $2.6K in individual donations in February. 6) Administrivia: we continue to work on outstanding workflow/tasks with the Accounting team.
1) ASF Sponsors: we enter 2022 with more than $1.6M in sponsorships closed. We continue our sponsorship activities, including securing new sponsors as well as renewals. Our open invoices include 3 Platinum, 2 Gold, 3 Silver, and 5 Bronze renewals, as well as 1 new Gold and 1 new Bronze Sponsors. We welcomed one new Platinum and one Bronze Sponsor. One Gold Sponsor has chosen not to renew for the 2022 sponsorship year. We received payment from two Platinum, two Gold, one Silver, and one Bronze Sponsors. 2) Targeted Sponsors: we have tightened our processes in response to an increase in the number of organizations seeking to contribute cash and/or services to benefit specific Apache Projects at an outlier level (outside of existing sponsorship tiers or accepted methods). 3) Sponsor Relations: in addition to our standard outreach, we sent New Year greetings to all ASF and Targeted Sponsors. We responded to a Sponsor query regarding the Log4j vulnerability and are working with Marketing & Publicity on a press release for a new sponsor at the Platinum level. We also onboarded/oriented four new Sponsor points-of-contact. 4) Event Sponsorship: an ApacheCon sponsorship remains outstanding since September. 5) Individual Donations and Corporate Giving: we received $1.78K in individual donations in January. 6) Administrivia: we continue to tidy up cross-department workflow/tasks involving the Treasury and Accounting teams.
1) ASF Sponsors: we wrapped the calendar year with much activity surrounding individual and corporate contributions, new Sponsorships, and several Sponsorship renewals. We have renewed 4 Platinum, 3 Gold, 3 Silver, and 3 Bronze Sponsors, and are pursuing 2 Bronze renewals. We welcomed one new Platinum and one Bronze Sponsor. An incoming Gold Sponsorship has been delayed several months due to an issue with our onboarding onto their vendor payment system. One Gold Sponsor will not be renewing for the 2022 sponsorship year. We received payment from one Platinum, one Gold, one Silver, and 3 Bronze Sponsors. 2) Targeted Sponsors: we are onboarding several new Targeted Sponsors who are donating services towards a handful of Apache projects. We also facilitated a new Targeted Sponsorship to benefit ASF Diversity & Inclusion. 3) Sponsor Relations: standard outreach continues, with New Year outreach forthcoming. 4) Event Sponsorship: we await final payment from the last remaining event sponsor. 5) Individual Donations and Corporate Giving: we continued to promote Individual Giving and Corporate Giving programs, and earned $39K in December over 178 donations via donate.apache.org. This includes $12.7K in individual donations, plus corporate donations from new and repeat donors, as well as several organizations wishing to direct their contributions to benefit Apache Logging Services. Additionally, we received contributions from various Corporate Giving programs from Fortune 50 concerns, charitable organizations, Donor-Advised Funds, and Retirement Equities Funds, among other contributors. 6) Administrivia: we are working with the Treasury and Accounting on some ongoing workflow issues that require rapid response as well as onboarding onto Sponsor vendor payment portals. These are particularly pressing during the latter part of the calendar year.
1) ASF Sponsors: we are entering our end-of-calendar-year busy season for renewals. We are in the process of renewing 9 Sponsors (2 Gold, 2 Silver, 5 Bronze), and pursuing 23 renewals (5 Platinum, 4 Gold, 3 Silver, and 11 Bronze). Three Platinum, 1 Gold, and 2 Bronze Sponsors have committed to renew, and we are waiting for their approval to proceed with the invoicing process. Of note is attrition with a small handful of SEO-focused Bronze Sponsors who have chosen not to renew in the 2022 sponsorship year, a pattern nearly identical to the previous year. We are awaiting payment from 5 Sponsors (2 Gold, 1 Silver, and 2 Bronze), and received payment from one Silver Sponsor and one Silver Targeted Sponsor. 2) Targeted Sponsors: our activities surrounding Targeted Sponsorships continue to grow, and are fine-tuning our sponsorship conditions and policies as a result. We welcomed a new Silver Targeted Sponsor and are onboarding several new Targeted Sponsors who are donating services towards an array of Apache projects. We are also helping facilitate a donation to benefit ASF Diversity & Inclusion, and help with a possible donation towards Infrastructure support. 3) Sponsor Relations: standard outreach continues, and are preparing end-of-year activities. We worked with Marketing & Publicity to publish a Platinum Sponsor "Success at Apache" post and are also discussing options with three additional Platinum Sponsors to promote their support of the ASF. 4) Event Sponsorship: we await final payment from a few remaining event sponsors. 5) Individual Donations and Corporate Giving: we earned $3,700 in November over 78 donations. We promoted Individual Giving and Corporate Giving programs, including the Giving Tuesday global charitable giving program, and will continue to do so through the end of the calendar year. 6) Administrivia: we are working with the Treasury to evaluate possible CRM options. We continue to work with Accounting on some AR/follow-through issues.
A report was expected, but not received
A report was expected, but not received
1) ASF Sponsors: we are renewing 7 Sponsors (3 Platinum, 1 Gold, 1 Silver, 2 Bronze); pursuing 2 renewals (1 Platinum, 1 Bronze); signing on 1 new Sponsor (1 Gold); awaiting payment from 9 Sponsors (3 Gold, 2 Silver, and 4 Bronze); and discussing Sponsorship with one candidate organization (level to be confirmed). Several Sponsors have verbally committed to renew, but have been slower to sign agreements, open purchase orders, and/or process payment over the past few months. We received payment from two renewing Sponsors at the Gold level. 2) Targeted Sponsors: we are onboarding three new Targeted Sponsors who are donating services to benefit four Apache projects. We have finalized our policy towards cash targeted donations vs. service/in-kind donations, and are executing agreements and invoices with these incoming Targeted Sponsors. 3) Sponsor Relations: we are promoting ApacheCon@Home and the Annual Report to all sponsors. 4) Event Sponsorship: ApacheCon@Home sponsorships are in-flight, with a handful of sponsor agreements and payments due in the remaining few weeks. We received payments from 3 sponsors, and await payment from 9 sponsors. 5) Individual Donations and Corporate Giving: this is historically a slower time of year for most charitable donations. We earned $838 in August over 46 donations. 6) Administrivia: we’re continuing to troubleshoot a small handful of AR/follow-through/reporting issues with the Accounting team, and are seeing gradual improvements.
1) ASF Sponsors: we are renewing 7 Sponsors (3 Platinum, 1 Gold, 1 Silver, 2 Bronze); pursuing 2 renewals (1 Platinum, 1 Bronze); signing on 1 new Sponsor (1 Gold); awaiting payment from 8 Sponsors (3 Gold, 2 Silver, and 3 Bronze); and discussing Sponsorship with one candidate organization (level to be confirmed). 2) Targeted Sponsors: we are onboarding three new Targeted Sponsors who are donating services to benefit three Apache projects, and are fine-tuning policy towards cash targeted donations vs. service/in-kind donations. 3) Sponsor Relations: we have promoted both ApacheCons Asia and @Home to all sponsors. 4) Event Sponsorship: ApacheCon sponsorships are in-flight, with a handful of sponsors needing to execute their agreements. We received payments from 7 sponsors, and await payment from 8 sponsors. 5) Individual Donations and Corporate Giving: we earned $2.3K in July over 60 donations. 6) Administrivia: we continue to troubleshoot some AR and follow-through issues with the Accounting team.
1) ASF Sponsors: we are renewing 6 Sponsors (2 Platinum, 1 Silver, 1 Bronze); pursuing 6 renewals (1 Platinum, 5 Bronze); signing on 3 new Sponsors (1 Gold, 2 Bronze); awaiting payment from 6 Sponsors (1 Platinum, 2 Gold, 1 Silver, and 2 Bronze); and discussing Sponsorship with two candidate organizations (level to be confirmed). 2) Targeted Sponsors: we have onboarded and are coordinating promotional opportunities with a new Targeted Sponsor at the Platinum level, and are waiting on a second incoming Targeted Sponsor to begin their onboarding process. We are also working with two organizations who are interested in donating services to benefit two Apache projects. 3) Sponsor Relations: standing Sponsor outreach and onboarding activities continue. We are preparing to promote both ApacheCons Asia and @Home in advance of their respective events. 4) Event Sponsorship: ApacheCon sponsorships are in-flight, with a handful of sponsors needing to execute their agreements. We received payments from 2 sponsors, and await payment from 11 sponsors. 5) Individual Donations and Corporate Giving: we earned $3.1K in June over 48 donations. 6) Administrivia: we continue to streamline operations and resolve access credentials for Sponsor vendor portals and payment systems, and are troubleshooting an AR follow-through issue with the Accounting team. Some Sponsor Ambassadors are also helping with Targeted Sponsor engagement as well as updates to the ASF Thanks page.
1) ASF Sponsors: we are renewing 2 Sponsors (1 Platinum, 1 Bronze), pursuing 11 Sponsor renewals (2 Platinum, 2 Silver, and 7 Bronze), and are awaiting payment from 6 Sponsors (1 Platinum, 2 Gold, 2 Silver, and 1 Bronze). We are discussing Sponsorship with two candidate organizations. 2) Targeted Sponsors: we are awaiting input to onboard a Targeted Sponsor at the Platinum level. 3) Sponsor Relations: standing Sponsor outreach continues. We are helping orient a Sponsor’s new OSPO head regarding their participation history. 4) Event Sponsorship: sponsorships for ApacheCon Asia and ApacheCon@Home are in-flight. We are rectifying payments from several ApacheCon Asia sponsors, and are awaiting payments from nine event sponsors. 5) Individual Donations and Corporate Giving: we earned $1.1K in May over 58 donations. The Treasury has decided that we will no longer accept cryptocurrency as a donation method. We have removed all references to the cryptocurrency from the ASF Fundraising pages as instructed. 6) Administrivia: operations are running smoothly, with the added support of some members of the Fundraising team who are serving as ApacheCon Sponsor Ambassadors.
1) ASF Sponsors: we are happy to close out FY2021 having exceeded our revenue goals. We are renewing a Platinum Sponsor and are pursuing 7 Sponsor renewals (2 Silver and 5 Bronze). We are awaiting payment from 6 Sponsors (1 Platinum, 2 Gold, 2 Silver, and 1 Bronze). We are discussing Sponsorship with two candidate organizations. 2) Targeted Sponsors: we onboarded a new Targeted Sponsor at the Platinum level and are awaiting input to onboard a second new Targeted Sponsor, also at the Platinum level. 3) Sponsor Relations: standing Sponsor outreach continues. We are working with a small handful of organizations with promotional opportunities included with their sponsorship. We published the first “Sponsor Success at Apache” post with Leaseweb (Targeted Platinum Sponsor). 4) Event Sponsorship: sponsorships for ApacheCon Asia and ApacheCon@Home are underway. A small handful of agreements for ApacheCon Asia were delayed in execution, which has been rectified. We are awaiting payments from three event sponsors as of the end of April. 5) Individual Donations and Corporate Giving: we earned $2.5K in April over 50 donations. 6) Administrivia: day-to-day operations are running smoothly, and we are enjoying additional participation from some members of the Fundraising team.
1) ASF Sponsors: we are happy to be closing out FY2021, having exceeded our revenue goals. We are renewing a Platinum Sponsor and are pursuing 10 renewals (three Silver, and seven Bronze Sponsors). We signed on three new Sponsors (one Gold and two Bronze), and are discussing Sponsorship with two candidate organizations. We are awaiting renewal payments from two Gold and one Bronze sponsor. 2) Targeted Sponsors: we are awaiting input to onboard a new Targeted Sponsor at the Platinum level, and are upgrading a Bronze Targeted Sponsor to the Platinum level. 3) Sponsor Relations: ongoing Sponsor outreach continues. We are continuing to work with a small handful of organizations with promotional opportunities included with their sponsorship. 4) Event Sponsorship: sponsorships for ApacheCon Asia and ApacheCon@Home have kicked off. Combined packages for both events have proven particularly attractive to sponsors, with Platinum level sponsorships already sold out. The event sponsorship process, from the prospectus to sales to contracting to invoicing, has been a smooth process, under the direction of VP Fundraising, ApacheCon event leads, select Sponsor Ambassadors, and Accounting. 5) Individual Donations and Corporate Giving: we earned $10,566 during March through Hopsie (donate.apache.org), which includes a Bronze Sponsorship payment as well as a corporate contribution from an Open Source advocacy group in Europe. 6) Administrivia: our workflow processes, including invoicing, payment processing, and reconciliation, are operating efficiently.
1) ASF Sponsors: we are working on $237K in renewals (one Platinum, two Gold, and two Bronze Sponsors), $56K of which is remaining in renewals for FY2021. We signed on three new Sponsors (one Gold and two Bronze), are discussing Sponsorship with two candidate organizations, and have $287K invoiced outstanding (new Sponsorships or confirmed renewals from one Platinum, three Gold, and one Bronze sponsor). We received $626K in Sponsor payments (three Platinum, three Gold, three Silver, three Bronze, and one Corporate Charitable Contribution valued in excess of a Platinum Sponsorship). 2) Targeted Sponsors: we are onboarding a new Targeted Sponsor at the Platinum level, and are in the process of upgrading a Bronze Targeted Sponsor to the Platinum level. 3) Sponsor Relations: ongoing Sponsor outreach continues. We are working with four organizations with various promotional offerings as part of their sponsorship. 4) Event Sponsorship: this year's ApacheCon@Home was just announced. Event Sponsorship will be announced in the coming weeks. 5) Individual Donations and Corporate Giving: we earned $8,453 during February through Hopsie (donate.apache.org), which includes a Bronze Sponsorship payment. We continue to receive charitable contributions on our online donation platform. 6) Administrivia: we continue to fine-tune our workflow processes, including payment reporting with ASF Accounting.
1) ASF Sponsors: we are working on $237K in renewals (one Platinum, two Gold, and two Bronze Sponsors). We signed on three new Sponsors (one Gold and two Bronze), are discussing Sponsorship with two candidate organizations, and have $581K invoiced (new Sponsorships or confirmed renewals from three Platinum, four Gold, and one Bronze sponsor). We received $626K in Sponsor payments (three Platinum, three Gold, three Silver, three Bronze, and one Corporate Charitable Contribution). 2) Targeted Sponsors: we onboarded a new Targeted Sponsor at the Gold level. 3) Sponsor Relations: ongoing Sponsor outreach continues. We are working with three organizations on promotional offerings as part of their sponsorship. 4) Event Sponsorship: no Apache events are in-flight at this time. 5) Individual Donations and Corporate Giving: we earned $11,842 during January through Hopsie (donate.apache.org), which now also accepts payments from Apple Pay, Google Pay, and Microsoft Pay. Select Sponsors continue to use our online donation platform to process payment of their Sponsorship fees. We also use the platform for select charitable contributions. 6) Administrivia: we continue to streamline, automate, and optimize our workflow processes and record-keeping.
1) ASF Sponsors: we are working on $68K in renewals (one Gold, and three Bronze Sponsors). We have $537K in invoicing (new Sponsorships or renewals in place, with monies due to the ASF: this is for three Platinum; three Gold; two Bronze Sponsors). We received $420K in Sponsor payments (two Platinum, two Gold, three Silver, and two Corporate Charitable Contributions). We welcomed (signed on) one new Platinum, one Gold, one Silver, and one Bronze Sponsor. We are now administering/maintaining all Sponsor accounting records. 2) Targeted Sponsors: we are working on securing Targeted renewals for the New Year, and completed end-of-year outreach with existing Targeted Sponsors. 3) Sponsor Relations: we have completed our end-of-year outreach to all Sponsors. We are working with three organizations considering ASF Sponsor promotional offerings as part of their sponsorship. 4) Event Sponsorship: no activity (there are no Apache events being planned at this time). 5) Individual Donations and Corporate Giving: we successfully closed our end-of-year Individual and Corporate Giving campaigns. We earned $7,602 during December over 103 donations through donate.apache.org. Select Sponsors also use our online donation platform to process payment of their Sponsorship renewals. 6) The work of ensuring our sponsor recognition (thanks page) matches our internal records is receiving a boost thanks to automation. Tooling now exists that identifies deltas between the two locations and will continue to be enhanced with the goal of full, automated synchronization.
1) ASF Sponsors: we are working on renewals for two Platinum Sponsors, two Gold Sponsors, and three Bronze Sponsors. One Platinum, two Gold, one Silver, and one Bronze Sponsors have confirmed renewals. One Platinum Sponsor has given verbal confirmation to renew but needs to secure budget in order to officially proceed. We are in the invoicing process with one Platinum, four Gold, one Silver, and two Bronze Sponsors. We have received payment from a Silver Sponsor, and one Bronze Sponsor is in arrears. One Bronze sponsor is unable to renew for the 2021 Sponsorship year. 2) Targeted Sponsors: we finalized the renewal of a Platinum Targeted Sponsorship, which was actively reworked over the past year. We are awaiting confirmation from an organization that committed resources with ASF Infrastructure, and will be onboarding them as a new Targeted Sponsor. We will soon be conducting end-of-year outreach with existing Targeted Sponsors. 3) Sponsor Relations: we have begun our end-of-year Sponsor outreach and are working with three organizations considering ASF Sponsor promotional offerings as part of their sponsorship. We held calls with three sponsors (one each Platinum, Gold, and Silver), and coordinated queries with ASF Legal Affairs, Brand Management, and the Apache Incubator. 4) Event Sponsorship: no activity (there are no Apache events being planned at this time). 5) Individual Donations and Corporate Giving: we earned $2,891 during November over 47 donations. We started the end-of-year campaigns, including Giving Tuesday and corporate giving programs, and have begun to receive several donations. We have been notified of an incoming corporate gift that would qualify the donor recognition as an ASF Sponsor.
1) ASF Sponsors: we are working on renewals for two Platinum Sponsors, three Gold Sponsors, two Silver Sponsors, and three Bronze Sponsors. One Gold, three Silver, and one Bronze Sponsors have confirmed renewals. We have also received renewal confirmation from two Platinum and one Gold Sponsors but are holding on invoicing until they give us the go-ahead. We are in the invoicing process with two Gold, four Silver, and four Bronze Sponsors. One Bronze Sponsor is unable to renew for the upcoming year. 2) Targeted Sponsors: we are fine-tuning a Platinum Targeted Sponsorship, which has been supporting ASF Infrastructure over the past several years, in preparation of the upcoming year. 3) Sponsor Relations: Sponsor outreach, engagement, and communication continue per usual. We have had three calls with Platinum Sponsors, all of whom are seeking additional visibility for their contributions; one of which is considering the Sponsor “Case Study” opportunity. 4) Event Sponsorship: all Event Sponsor payments have now been received for ApacheCon@Home, and also received a corporate donation from the event. 5) Individual Donations and Corporate Giving: we have earned $3,907 total during October over 45 donations. We worked with Central Services for this year’s Giving Tuesday event, as well as end-of-year giving campaigns. We are also working with Marketing & Publicity regarding launching a possible ad program to benefit our giving campaigns.
1) ASF Sponsor status: we are working on renewals for three Platinum Sponsors, four Gold Sponsors, two Silver Sponsors, and five Bronze Sponsors. We have approached a corporate donor (one-time cash donation, valued above the Gold Sponsorship level) for possible repeat donation. We have signed on two new Bronze Sponsors, and have confirmed renewal of one Bronze Sponsor. We have received payment for a Platinum renewal, and are processing payment for one Silver Sponsor. 2) Targeted sponsor status: a Silver Targeted Sponsor upgraded to Platinum, which supports ASF Infrastructure. We are considering approaching a Targeted Bronze Sponsorship that was donated in support of an Apache Project for possible renewal. 3) Sponsor Relations: Sponsor outreach, engagement, and communication continue. We promoted ApacheCon@Home sponsorship opportunities and other ASF activities. We had discussions with two Sponsors, one of which requested our assistance with a request from a PMC. One of our official points-of-contact is on leave, and we have been in semi-regular contact with them. Another point-of-contact has left their organization and we’re on-boarding their replacement. 4) Event Sponsorship: we have successfully processed all 11 ApacheCon@Home sponsorships. Payments for all are nearly complete. 5) Individual Donations and Corporate Giving: we have earned $6,200 total during September over 45 donations, which includes a Platinum Sponsor for ApacheCon@Home. We have resolved an issue pertaining to a fraudulent charge that took place in August. We are also preparing for this year’s Giving Tuesday event, which is taking place 1 December 2020.
1) ASF Sponsor status: we are pursuing renewals for one Platinum, one Gold, and two Silver Sponsors; we have a dozen additional sponsors up for renewal in Q4 of 2020. One Platinum sponsor has renewed one quarter prior to their anniversary. Payments have been received from one Platinum and two Bronze Sponsors. One Gold and one Silver sponsor have renewed, and one Platinum has downgraded to Silver. We are in the invoicing process with two Platinum, one Gold, one Silver, and three Bronze Sponsors, one of which is a new sponsor. We are discussing possible sponsorship with four organizations (sponsorship levels not yet confirmed). 2) Targeted sponsor status: discussions continue with two candidate Targeted Sponsors interested in providing support to ASF Infrastructure. 3) Sponsor Relations: Sponsor outreach, development, and communication continues. We have issued a sponsor update focusing on the August month-in-review, ApacheCon@Home, and project interviews on Feathercast. 4) Event Sponsorship: we have successfully processed this year’s ApacheCon@Home sponsors that include Apple, AWS, Codethink, DataStax, IBM, Imply, Instaclustr, OpenLogic, PostgreSQL Association, Red Hat, and VMware. A few additional sponsors are in-flight. 5) Individual Donations and Corporate Giving: we have earned $22,535+ total during August. This includes sponsors using Hopsie for online payment processing that includes ASF Sponsors (one Bronze renewal); ApacheCon@Home (one Platinum payment); ASF Conferences partner (payment for use of the ApacheCon Hopin account), as well as 40 individual donations, including one donation for $7,200. We have also received a contribution from FOSS Responders’ UPLIFT! program.
1) ASF Sponsor status: we are pursuing renewals for one Platinum, one Gold, three Silver, and one Bronze sponsors. We continue to pursue new points-of-contact for one Silver sponsor, whose primary point-of-contact has left the organization. One Platinum sponsor that was in arrears from FY2020 is no longer being pursued for renewal. Payments have been received from one Platinum Sponsor and one Gold Sponsor has renewed. Due to pandemic impacts on their business, one Platinum Sponsor has renewed at a lower level and one Bronze Sponsor was unable to renew. We are in the invoicing process with one Gold and five Bronze Sponsors (two of whom are new Sponsors). We are discussing a crypto-to-fiat contribution, reviewing Sponsorship options with one candidate organization, and continue to explore options for future sponsor prospecting. 2) Targeted sponsor status: discussions with two candidate Targeted Sponsors interested in providing support to ASF Infrastructure have quieted, but we are continuing to follow up. 3) Sponsor Relations: Ongoing Sponsor outreach, development, and communication continues. We have issued a sponsor update focusing on the July month-in-review, the FY2020 Annual Report, ApacheCon@Home, and Feathercast. 4) Event Sponsorship: Four Platinum sponsors have --DataStax, Instaclustr, Red Hat, and VMware-- signed on for ApacheCon@Home. Three additional sponsors are in-flight. 5) Individual Donations and Corporate Giving: we have earned $1,190 over the past month. We have received a corporate matching gift from AOL. We had an incident with a bot that was attempting fraudulent credit card payments via donate.apache.org and slammed us with more than 600 messages in ~90 minutes. The Hopsie team responded within the hour, stopped the attempts, and also implemented a captcha challenge for all donations.
1) ASF Sponsor status: we are pursuing renewals for two Platinum, one Gold, three Silver, and two Bronze sponsors. We await purchase orders to invoice renewals for one Platinum sponsor. We are still seeking new points-of-contact for one Silver sponsor, and have been trying various contacts within this organization. One Platinum sponsor remains in arrears. Payments have been received from one Gold Sponsor. Two Bronze Sponsors have renewed. We are in the invoicing process with one Platinum, one Gold, and three Bronze Sponsors. We are discussing Sponsorship options with two candidate organizations, and continue to explore options for future sponsor prospecting. 2) Targeted sponsor status: We are in discussions with two candidate Targeted Sponsors interested in providing support to ASF Infrastructure. 3) Sponsor Relations: We’ve connected with those Sponsors interested in ApacheCon and have guided them to the ApacheCon@Home site and prospectus. Ongoing Sponsor outreach, development, and communication continues. 4) Events: Sales for ASF Conferences launched 10 days ago with immediate interest. Thus far, we have secured three sponsorship agreements and two in flight. 5) Individual Donations and Corporate Giving: we have earned $2,670 over the past month. We have registered as a recipient of the American Express Corporate Matching Gifts program for contributions and volunteer hours made by their employees. The ASF was one of ten organizations awarded a distribution from the UPLIFT! initiative by FOSS Responders.
1) ASF Sponsor status: we are pursuing renewals for one Platinum, one Gold, and two Bronze sponsors. We continue to wait for purchase orders to invoice renewals for one Platinum sponsor. We signed a 5-year agreement with a Platinum Sponsor, and confirmed one Sponsor upgrade from Silver to Gold. We are seeking new points-of-contact for one Silver and one Bronze sponsor. One Platinum sponsor is in arrears. Two Silver Sponsors have chosen not to renew, whilst one Gold and one Silver Sponsor have asked to delay their renewals to Q3. We signed on one new Bronze Sponsor this month. Payments have been received from one Gold, one Silver, and one Bronze Sponsor. We await payment on renewals from one Platinum and one Gold. We Performed an audit of Sponsors with multi-year commitments, specifically those who had locked in their rates prior to our first-ever increase in 2017, as well as Bronze Sponsors who secured a linked listing with through a multi-year commitment. We also changed all the Sponsor links at http://apache.org/foundation/thanks to rel="sponsored" per our updated policy set last month. We had a misfire with an appeal email from a service provider that was sent to an improperly vetted list, and worked with Marketing and Publicity to craft statements and address any backlash. We are also exploring options for future sponsor prospecting. 2) Targeted sponsor status: we continue to confirm Targeted Sponsor commitments. Our efforts towards developing a new Targeted fund specifically earmarked for TAC recipients to ASF Conferences are on hold until face-to-face events resume. One Sponsor who committed support for ASF Infra have apparently terminated support with no notice; we are seeking clarity on this action. We are also exploring options with a candidate Targeted Sponsor interested in providing support to ASF Infrastructure. 3) Sponsor Relations: Sponsor queries regarding opportunities to support ApacheCon have subsided as those interested are still awaiting information, and we await information from ASF Conferences. It has been a somewhat quiet month otherwise, as the coronavirus continues to impact budgets and headcount at some sponsor organizations. 4) Events: we are ready to begin sales for ASF Conferences once the planning team finalizes the prospectuses and plans for the remaining events in 2020. 5) Individual Donations and Corporate Giving: we have earned $1,100 over the past month. We participated in #GivingTuesdayNOW, a COVID-focused campaign earlier in the month. Individual giving continues to slow down in light on the pandemic.
1) ASF Sponsor status: we are pursuing renewals for one Platinum, one Gold, one Silver, and three Bronze sponsors. One Silver has been acquired and their renewal status remains unknown. We continue to wait for purchase orders to invoice renewals for one Platinum sponsor. One Gold sponsor has upgraded to Platinum, and one Platinum has downgraded to Gold. We are seeking new points-of-contact for one Silver and one Bronze sponsor. One Platinum sponsor is in arrears, and one Silver sponsor has chosen not to renew. An incoming crypto-to-fiat donation has been postponed to Q2 FY2021 due to market fluctuations. We received two queries regarding Bronze sponsorship and have signed on one new Bronze Sponsor this month. 2) Targeted sponsor status: we continue to confirm Targeted Sponsor commitments. Our efforts towards developing a new Targeted fund specifically earmarked for TAC recipients to ASF Conferences continue, but will hold the program until face-to-face events resume. We have been approached by a candidate Targeted Sponsor interested in providing support to ASF Infrastructure. 3) Sponsor Relations: we are responding to Sponsor queries regarding opportunities to support ApacheCon. 4) Events: we are ready to reconfigure prospectuses and begin sales for ASF Conferences once the planning team finalizes next steps for the remaining events in 2020. 5) Individual Donations and Corporate Giving: we have earned $925 over the past month. Individual giving, in general, has slowed down due to COVID-19 constraints.
ASF Sponsor status: we are pursuing renewals for one Platinum, one Gold, five Silver, and three Bronze sponsors, of which one Gold and one Silver have been acquired and their renewal status remains unknown. We continue to wait for purchase orders to invoice renewals for one Platinum and one Gold sponsor. We are seeking a new point-of-contact for one Silver and three Bronze sponsors. One Gold sponsor remains in arrears. We have had no new Sponsors this month. Targeted sponsor status: we continue to confirm Targeted Sponsor commitments. We are developing a new Targeted fund specifically earmarked for TAC recipients to ASF Conferences. We have a new Targeted Sponsor that will mostly focus on promoting ASF Conferences as a media partner for all events. Sponsor Relations: we have been following up with Sponsors on the ASF 21st Anniversary and other Foundation updates. Events: we have suspended sales for ASF Conferences that were cancelled or postponed due to the coronavirus. Individual Donations and Corporate Giving: we have earned $790 over the past month. Worldwide donations have been generally directed towards efforts supporting the COVID-19 pandemic. Over the past quarter we experienced a high volume of ongoing fraudulent donation attempts that are now easily blocked through the Hopsie dashboard.
Fundraising continues operating smoothly with renewals and business-as-usual work. We are pursuing renewals for one Gold, two Silver, and two Bronze sponsors. One sponsor has deepened their commitment to The ASF by upgrading to Platinum and signing a multi-year sponsorship agreement. We are waiting for purchase orders to invoice renewals for one Platinum and one Gold sponsor. One Gold and one Silver sponsor have been acquired and are sorting out their future budgets/strategy. We have been seeking a new point-of-contact for one Silver and one Bronze sponsors. One Gold sponsor is in arrears. We had no new Sponsors this month. We are finalizing our outreach to our Targeted Sponsors to confirm their commitment to renew their benefits to The ASF through 2020. We will continue to work on developing a new Targeted fund specifically earmarked for TAC recipients to ASF events in collaboration with the TAC team, but will hold off on its launch until travel bans and coronavirus-related issues ease. We also received a new Targeted donation to benefit Apache Tomcat. We have reached out to all Sponsors regarding their renewals, per their usual sponsorship cycle. We also pre-pitched sponsorship opportunities for ASF Conferences in 2020. We will be following up to share the Q3 Operations Summary as well as the ASF Statement on the COVID-19 coronavirus Outbreak and an update on ASF conferences. Support for ASF Conferences in 2020 continues as usual, comprising 3 Roadshows in North America and 1 in Europe, as well as ApacheCon North America. We have ceased sales for those Roadshows that were cancelled or postponed due to the coronavirus. We earned $2,215 over the past month from individual donations and corporate giving. We have been experiencing a high volume of repeat fraudulent donation attempts over the past few months, and have successfully worked with Hopsie and ASF Infrastructure to resolve the issue.
We continue operating nominally with regular renewals. Of note is that one Gold and one Silver sponsor have been acquired and are sorting out their future strategy. We have been seeking a new point-of-contact for one of our Bronze sponsors. We have three sponsors that are in arrears. We welcomed one new Bronze Sponsor, Xplenty, this month. Our outreach to our Targeted Sponsors to confirm their commitment for the 2020 year continues. The majority of existing Targeted Sponsors have confirmed to renew donated products and services. We have also reached out to all Sponsors regarding their renewals, per their usual sponsorship cycle. We have also pre-pitched sponsorship opportunities for ASF Conferences in 2020. We're continuing to engage with ASF Conferences team to provide support and process documentation. With 3 Roadshows in North America and 1 in Europe, as well as ApacheCon North America, we want to be sure the procedures we work up are commonly understood and useful for all teams involved. Of note, we've finalized our process for sponsorship sales and documented the procedure for future events. Individual Donations and Corporate Giving: we have earned $1,950 over the past month. Some sponsors are also using the donation interface to pay for their sponsorship renewals using a credit card; we received a Silver Sponsorship renewal payment this month. We experienced a high volume of repeat fraudulent donation attempts, and are working with Hopsie and ASF Infrastructure to resolve the issue. We are also working to socialize and improve understanding of the link policy modification communicated in November. The sponsorship page has been updated to indicate that all links are rel="sponsored" and we're planning an email communication for all existing sponsors to let them know about the upcoming change upon their renewal.
As with prior months, we continue processing renewals smoothly through business-as-usual activities. Of note, we've recently had a sponsor upgrade from Bronze to Silver. Additionally, two Bronze sponsors will not be renewing: one is no longer in business, and the other has chosen to not renew their sponsorship. We continue pursuing overdue sponsorship fees as well as working through email connectivity issues with a prospective Silver sponsor. We are supporting sponsorship for ASF Conferences in 2020, comprising 3 Roadshows in North America and 1 in Europe, as well as ApacheCon North America. All outstanding sponsor payments for 2019 ApacheCons are now closed, with thanks to Virtual. Additionally, we had a great touchbase with EVP and TAC (+M&P) in late December during our weekly Fundraising call that should lead to improved awareness among our "departments". We are delighted to share that the Individual and Corporate Giving campaign, which launched on 27 November and ended on 31 December, grossed $14,240 over 112 individual donations and 3 corporate gifts. This reflects a 222% increase over last 2018's yield. We are pleased that several past donors participated again in this year’s campaign, and provided some heartening feedback. One donor wrote: "Your expressions in your email is exactly why the global community owes Apache full support. Years ago when I needed an office suite and could not afford Microsoft Word, Apache was there for me. You make computer literacy and online fluency possible for billions around the world. Thank you for being there." We have reached out to all Sponsors regarding their renewals, per their usual sponsorship cycle. Our Ambassadors Ted Lieu, Bob Paulin, and Craig Russell have been bringing forth new candidate Sponsors this year. Part of our program is to actively engage with sponsors throughout the year to alert them of upcoming events, activities, and opportunities, and are dovetailing with Marketing & Publicity outreach in select instances as appropriate. Sponsor reception has been positive --recent feedback includes: "Loving all the sponsor / marketing / publicity activity. Professional, positive, crisp, and awesome" and "thanks also for your support...you are very generous".
Our typical Fundraising operations continue as usual. Several renewals have been processed and several are in flight. We saw a pleasant change in sponsorship level with one sponsor upgrading from Bronze to Silver. Two bronze sponsors have rolled off (on has gone out of business and the second is not renewing). We continue working with a new Silver sponsor, but progress is slow due to email deliverability challenges We are excited to have completed onboarding for two new Targeted Sponsorships. The Apache Cordova project received an anonymous donation and Cloudbees is providing benefits to ASF Infrastructure https://s.apache.org/buq73 Although we've only just closed all remaining ApacheCon 2019 payments, work for ApacheCon and the various roadshows in 2020 has begun. In November we received $8,686 from individual and corporate donors via Hopsie with THREE QUARTERS ($6,519) being raised during the Individual and Corporate Giving campaign, which launched on 27 November and will continue to run through the end of 2019.
Fundraising continues operating smoothly. We are in the process of renewing additional sponsors --3 Platinum, 3 Gold, 1 Silver, and 1 Bronze-level Sponsors. Payment has been received by 1x Platinum, 1x Gold, and 1x Silver. We look forward to announcing a new Sponsor at the Silver level after identifying some issues with email (China firewall?) that caused a few weeks' delay. We continue working on two new Targeted Sponsorships: one to benefit the Apache Cordova project, and the other for ASF Infrastructure. The Infrastructure-supporting sponsor is being onboarded and is working with ASF Marketing & Publicity on messaging and related communications. We are beginning to support sponsorship planning for ASF Conferences in 2020, including Roadshows in North America and Europe, as well as ApacheCon North America. We are continuing to help Virtual/Accounting on remaining sponsor payments for 2019 ApacheCons in North America and Europe Campaign preparations for Individual Giving season, which includes Corporate Giving, has begun. These will launch in the next few weeks. We received about $1,185 from individual donors via Hopsie. We have modified our link policy for the "thanks page". Going forward, all new Sponsor links will be added with the rel="sponsored" tag. See http://www.apache.org/foundation/sponsorship.html#Links. Existing links will be converted upon renewal or opt-in by the Sponsor. Site, policy, form, and agreement documentation has been updated. We were delighted to say hello to and thank several of our sponsors in person at COSCon in Shanghai Nov 2 and 3. Attending the event from the Fundraising team was Daniel Ruggeri (VP Fundraising) and Ted Liu (Sponsor Ambassador, COSCon organizer).
Fundraising continues firing on all cylinders with efficient and effective work. We are in the process of renewing 3 Platinum, 2 Gold, and 2 Silver-level Sponsors. 2 Bronze sponsors have renewed, with payment received by one of them. We are also in conversations with a NEW Silver sponsor. The previously reported consolidation of an ASF and Targeted Platinum sponsorship has been finalized. Big thanks to the extended team's work over the past year+ to make it happen. A targeted sponsorship for D&I was received and processed per our BAU procedure. This was the first exercise of the procedure and worked well. We are also in conversation for a potential targeted cash sponsorship for a project as well as for Infra. We're also continuing conversations around a potential crypto-to-fiat donation, and are awaiting next steps from the donor. We continue to support ApacheCon Europe, having recently completed all outstanding signatures and agreements. Preliminary discussions have begun regarding the Seattle Roadshow. Day-to-day operations are optimized: weekly status calls are ongoing, and longer-term projects are underway (including fine-tuning Bronze Sponsorships; promoting Targeted Sponsorships; streamlining Fundraising-related online assets; and preparing campaigns for Individual Giving season) We have received ~$1,280 individual donors via Hopsie.
Fundraising continues operating smoothly. We secured 3 new Bronze Sponsors this past month. We are working on two Bronze and one Platinum renewals. We are also finalizing consolidation of a combined (ASF + Targeted) Platinum sponsorship. After another successful ApacheCon North America, we are responding to final event-closing inquiries and are preparing for 2020 events. We continue supporting ApacheCon Europe. During ApacheCon North America, we held a great Sponsor luncheon to spend time with our ASF family. 22 Sponsor representatives and 13 ASF team members (Board, Executive, and Sponsor Ambassadors) participated. An article that scrutinized the ASF Sponsorship program at the Bronze level was published https://www.brinzan.com/2019/09/apache-software-foundation-selling-links-for-seo/, causing some confusion and distress with a small handful of sponsors whose links may be affected. We are discussing any potential changes needed. After publishing the ASF FY2019 Annual Report https://s.apache.org/FY2019AnnualReport Sally, along with ASF Sponsor Ambassadors Ted Liu, Bob Paulin, and Craig Russell, connected with all Sponsors to share news of this milestone and extend assistance during ApacheCon. We received ~$1,930 from individual donors via Hopsie, with an additional $2,000 ACH payment pending. $1,105 of the above total donations was raised as part of the ”Trillions” documentary campaign https://s.apache.org/trillions
Fundraising business is operating smoothly. We are pleased to welcome 1 new Silver and 2 new Bronze foundation sponsors this month. We also renewed 1 Platinum, 2 Silver, and 3 Bronze sponsors. Work continues consolidating terms of a combined (ASF + Targeted) Platinum sponsorship. The previously reported email issues with a sponsor in China have been resolved. They have renewed their sponsorship and are also becoming an ApacheCon sponsor, and are in the final stages of document signature. Restructuring continues, with updated records, new forms, and online account maintenance. The online form-based onboarding is working well and new sponsor agreements and renewals are successfully being processed using DocuSign. We are continuing to work with Virtual to sign on new sponsors for ApacheCon/Las Vegas, and continue working with new thinking/Plain Schwarz on bolstering their sponsor activities. ~$900 received from individual donors via Hopsie, which is not uncommon during the holiday period. We are using the publishing of the annual report as a prompt to engage sponsors through our ambassadors.
Fundraising continues to go well thanks to our wonderful sponsors. This month we secured two new Bronze sponsorships and have processed four renewals (2 Silver, 2 Bronze). We continue the efforts around consolidating terms of an ASF + Targeted Platinum sponsorship. This has been an ongoing effort with the sponsor, Infra and Fundraising for several months. Conversation has picked up recently and a path forward has been identified. We also continue our relentless pursuit of improved operations by driving focus on updating record keeping, securing, and maintaining online accounts. New sponsor agreements and renewals are successfully being processed using Docusign through Virtual ensuring these activities continue to run smoothly. Sponsor onboarding is now also done via online form which directly feeds the central data tracker for sponsors. This unlocks significant automation capabilities down the road! Support for events remains on track and doing well. We are continuing to sign on new sponsors for ApacheCon US and ApacheCon EU as well as working with both sponsorship lead teams to improve sponsorship sales. We received $3,135 from individual donors via Hopsie. An ApacheCon Bronze sponsor also paid their sponsorship fee via Hopsie during this period as well.
A report was expected, but not received
Fundraising continues securing sponsorship renewals and are working with Virtual closely on invoicing and following through with sponsor payment. We were also able to renew AND upgrade a Sponsor whose account was in arrears for 6 months. As with our prior report, our Sponsor Ambassadors are "current" on communications and check-ins. We continue working to consolidate terms of combined (ASF + Targeted) Platinum sponsorship; steady progress has been made over the past quarter. As with the prior report, onboarding of a Targeted Platinum Sponsor remains on hold pending legal clearance. A potentially worrisome situation continues to present itself where we have problems with email deliverability when reaching a sponsor in China. We have had to resort to using our private emails to send messages (copying @apache.org lists) until the issue is resolved. Infra is aware of the situation. We have closed 22 event sponsor opportunities (with 12 organizations) and 2 media partnerships across Apache Roadshow/Chicago (1), ApacheCon/Las Vegas (19), and ApacheCon/Berlin (2). Sponsor agreements have successfully been signed using our new Docusign account; we are waiting for final confirmation from 5 additional companies to enter contracts. To that end, the digital sponsorship agreement process investment has helped simplify the acts of creating/sending/signing/gathering completed event agreements. Through this process change, we've witnessed a decrease in volunteer time spent doing such clerical work. Although we've had a slow start, we are working closely with Virtual’s business development/growth team on targeting, qualifying, and pitching candidate sponsors for both events and the foundation. We're pleased to report that we received $4,927+ from individual donors via Hopsie (PLUS additional payments received from PayPal and Amazon independently) this past month.
Fundraising continues securing sponsorship renewals and are working with Virtual closely on invoicing and following through with sponsor payment. We were also able to recover payment and reinstate a Sponsor whose account was in arrears for 11 months. As with our prior report, our Sponsor Ambassadors are "current" on communications and check-ins. This has allowed us to catch and correct Sponsor personnel/contact/email quickly. We have been unable to onboard a Targeted Platinum Sponsor, and are awaiting clearance from ASF Legal in order to proceed. We continue engaging with the Conferences team in support of our three events: Apache Roadshow/Chicago, ApacheCon/Las Vegas, and ApacheCon/Berlin. We have finalized the base sponsorship agreement for event (ApacheCon, Roadshow and multi-event) sponsorships. We have onboarded with DocuSign to streamline and improve the discoverability of documents via a templatized, digital signing process. We're happy to have supported the efforts around The ASF's 20th Anniversary, responding to the Apache Events CFPs and Event Sponsorships. We're pleased to report that we've received $5,620 from individual donors through our Hopsie page. We're also pleased to receive ~$1,800 from proceeds of the InnerSource Commons Summit, which is a recurring donation from that community.
Fundraising is doing well with timely renewals, invoicing and sponsor contacts. Our Sponsor Ambassadors have completed outreach/check-in with ASF Sponsors and Targeted Sponsors. Big thanks to our Sponsor Ambassadors for their effort. We are also in the process of welcoming two new sponsors and are happy to report this month that more than $500 USD has been donated by individual donors. We also continue working with Platinum and Gold sponsors for promotional opportunities. Three Platinum sponsors have recently taken advantage of the benefit and we will soon be releasing a Sponsor case study. We're also working with sponsors for our 20th Anniversary. Work with ASF events has continued picking up. We've partnered with the Conferences team to help finalize event prospectuses for Apache Roadshow Chicago, ApacheCon NA Las Vegas and ApacheCon EU Berlin. Sponsorship support for the events is going well. We are also engaged with the event producers to establish processes. We continue our ongoing records maintenance and accounts reconciliation on the backend of our processes and published our FY2019 Q3 report.
As always: we can't do what we do without our sponsors so we are delighted to welcome AWS (Platinum) and Workday (Gold) to the ASF family as sponsors this past month. We also renewed four sponsorships and received $3,414.55 from 42 donors via our individual giving platform. We thank everyone for keeping the family strong! As the Fundraising committee continues the "back office" work, we are pleased to report that outreach to all ASF Sponsors and Targeted Sponsors has been initiated as planned. Through these activities, we have confirmed renewal from most Targeted Sponsors and increases in support for several Targeted Sponsors going forward. These conversations even resulted in a new Apache Incubator project proposal from a Platinum Sponsor! We also continue conversations with top tier sponsors for promotional opportunities such as the recently posted case study from Gold Sponsor, Bloomberg (https://s.apache.org/jKNc). Last but not least, we greatly enjoyed shaking hands and exchanging smiles at FOSDEM with our ASF family members that could make it. The Fundraising committee is also gearing up for 2019 event support under a new model and has engaged with the various event planning teams. Our own Bob Paulin (Sponsor Ambassador) will serve as Event Sponsor Ambassador for the Apache Roadshow Chicago event. Sharan Foga (VP ComDev) will serve as Event Sponsor Ambassador for the ApacheConEU event in 2019 and Daniel Ruggeri (VP Fundraising) will handle ApacheCon NA 2019. Early engagement and clear documentation of roles/responsibilities with the various event planning teams will ensure another round of awesome events for 2019! We continue driving internal efficiencies in the committee to ensure our Sponsors know how much we love them. A few notable activities: - Restructuring of team activities including regular reporting schedule from Sponsor Ambassadors - Formalized process and documentation for ASF Conference (ApacheCon and Roadshows) support - Documentation of roles/responsibilities/workflow for the new Event Sponsor Ambassador role and overall event planning support - Streamlining record keeping processes including reconciliation with Accounting - Continued auditing/cleanup of mailing lists and notification channels The team also thanks Kevin A McGrail for his hard work and dedication (VP and Co-VP Fundraising) over the past two years as he steps away from Fundraising. We have successfully completed transition of notes, ongoing action items and plans as of early Feb and wish Kevin luck in all his future endeavors.
Fundraising continues to support and add value to the foundation and KAM is executing on the tasks for a graceful exit. His work will be divided up among a combination of increased hours for HALO, new work for Virtual and a freelancer is being sought for event fundraising. Our monthly committee meetings continue with our last meeting on Jan 10th. New meetings will be standing meetings on the 2nd Thursday of the month. The time of day is being discussed by the committee. There is no major change in event fundraising to report beyond talks continue and final prospectuses are needed for the ACNA, ACEU and Chicago Roadshow events. Financially, we continue to add more sponsors and fundraising goals are being met or exceeded. With the ASF running under budget, gaining more sponsors and some early sponsor payments, we are now $708K ahead of budget based on Net Income for the Fiscal Year to Date. With the current budget and reserves, we have jumped from 10.5 to 15.5 months of operational monies in our operating accounts. Adding the additional monies from Pineapple and the restricted donation earmarked for the endowment we could consider that an additional 9.3 months in reserve by our calculations. Finally, total cash as of Dec 31st, 2018 is $3,720.7K as compared to $1,663.1K on Dec 31st 2017 representing a $2,057.6K increase in one year.
Fundraising continues well financially. Our monthly committee meetings continue and our next meeting is on the 10th of January and guests are welcome. Financially, we continue to add more sponsors and fundraising goals are being met or exceeded. With being under budget, gaining more sponsors and some early sponsor payments, we are now $600K ahead of budget based on Net Income for the Fiscal Year to Date with 10.5 months of reserves in our operating accounts plus additional monies from Pineapple and the restricted donation earmarked for the endowment. An initial prospectus for ApacheCon EU 2019 was sent and we are currently working on verbals for 4 platinum sponsors. Fundraising for ApacheCon EU 2019 and a Roadshow Event in Chicago as well as a combined event in Spain is also under way. The DC Event has a new date of March 25th. We encourage you to visit http://www.apache.org/foundation/thanks.html and thank our sponsors any time the opportunity arises. As a charity, we rely completely on their altruism.
Fundraising continues well with no issues to report. Our monthly committee meetings continue and our next meeting is on the 28th and guests are welcome. Financially, we continue to add more sponsors and fundraising goals are being met or exceeded. The foundation is currently running in the black and is significantly ahead of budget. The endowment is now being driven by VP Finance. A draft prospectus and fundraising input were given for ApacheCon 2019 and a Roadshow Event in Chicago. The DC Event is postponed and a new date will be forthcoming. A new statement of work has been implemented for KAM through the FY. We have stopped taking car donations.
Fundraising continues steaming along and our monthly committee meetings continue. Our next meeting is on the 24th. As of this month’s financials, we are 40K in the black for the FY and 364K ahead of budget with revenue ahead of targets. Event sponsorship for 2018 has topped $195K with two more sponsors for the DC Roadshow likely and a few more in discussions. The Sponsor Lunch during ApacheCon in Montreal was very successful. Sponsorship for ACNA 2019 is being ducked in a row and a draft prospectus was produced for the planning committee. Happy to say that 3 people took the ambassador training with Sally at ApacheCon (Ted Liu, Craig Russell & Bob Paulin). We've also been exploring how Fundraising might use OfBiz Sally, Daniel Ruggeri and KAM have been meeting with platinum sponsors to discuss the endowment collecting answers in a spreadsheet. The introduction letter is at https://docs.google.com/document/d/1TV29CJvidVr1hxnkqnhi05mGVbty1ohvIIbPrzL1GL4/edit We hope to present results from 6 meetings with sponsors during the board meeting.* We are working on a revised Targeted Sponsorship policy to handle targeting just a particular project. Several dozen comments were received on the matter so it will take some time to properly respond. Finally, Kevin is exploring a way to support udemy, pluralsight and udacity's requests to work with the ASF to provide content to their subscribers. * Endowment Preliminary Research Report The support for the endowment is overwhelmingly positive[1]. Daniel, Sally & KAM spoke[2] to 5 platinum & 1 gold sponsors and, in general, they view an endowment as a good idea and as a sign of maturity for the foundation. Beyond that, the fundraising committee is in a catch-22 where endowment funders definitely want “something” in return for their contribution and “something” needs to be defined. There were some interesting concerns such as not wanting to contribute too little leading to negative press for being cheap as well as not allowing investment vehicles that are pro-tobacco or pro-gun. But overall, the framework of only ceding the control of the corpus seems to be a viable method to gain their trust and provide a benefit that is within the Apache Way. (See "What are the consortium members promised?" in https://docs.google.com/document/d/1xDGGTV9ErNEJwGe7dk_17K7AeKFvOwHkC46Kg4yZtgQ/edit) Another tenable idea from the discussions was setting up an advisory board from the endowment funders proving non-binding input to the board on matters to be decided. The people we spoke to were the contacts for the budgets for normal sponsorship. Overall, there will be concerns that they would be able to fund either the endowment or the normal sponsorship. A few stated that they would not be the right contact for such a sponsorship but all offered to be the conduit to the right people when we are ready. [1] Responses: [2] Questions Asked: https://docs.google.com/a/gsuite.cloud.apache.org/forms/d/1-Xucr48ITEpEBDqiupJxsIYrdySw0CRnwCas-kUkVMw/edit?usp=drive_web For the platinum sponsors, we mentioned verbally that the minimum would likely be ~$500k We also discussed the voting idea which might have prejudiced their answer. The same with the advisory boards though this was brought up by some sponsors. In general though, the vote and the advisory board will likely give the sponsor evangelists something they can “sell” internally to justify the endowment. Introductory document: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1TV29CJvidVr1hxnkqnhi05mGVbty1ohvIIbPrzL1GL4/edit Recommended Next Steps: - Send the Google Form to All Sponsors for their Input - Report to the board next meeting on the results - Discuss what the board is willing to provide as a benefit, if anything, in exchange for the endowment (e.g., voting, advisory board). - Setup a Finance Committee to review chaired by the VP Finance and recommend a scenario to the board for the Nov board meeting
Fundraising is going well and our monthly committee meetings continue. Event sponsorship for 2018 has topped $192K and ApacheCon and the DC Roadshow are both expected to be in the black. As of this month’s financials, we are within $1K of being break even and $453K ahead of budget. As promised, the Targeted Sponsorship Policy is completed https://docs.google.com/document/d/1JhZEcty2fSx7ZxiBs41j3qOUrqsA7TvKmQ13ZZ61lJY/edit We have a Sponsor Lunch planned during ApacheCon in Montreal Daniel Ruggeri is working with Infra to automate access to G Suite. Minor note: Open Graph Protocol has been implemented for ApacheCon.com. You can see this if you post something on LinkedIn mentioning apachecon.com vs apachecon.com/usroadshow18 vs http://apachecon.com/acna18/. Potentially useful to look at the meta tags for this for other needs in the future.
Fundraising continues to go well. KAM is firewalling the ASF while doing work with other hats using Ross' approach about "can we talk about this later" if it comes up. Work for additional bronze ambassador support from Tom is still delayed Committee meetings continue to occur monthly. Last was held on August 2nd. Work helping fundraise sponsors for Apache Events is going well and to-date tallies about $174K. No more fundraising to be done for AC2018. Work with Hopsie on issues in the donation receipts and fraud prevention continues. Donation for Microsoft O365 back on track. Visited SF with a visit to Twitter as a potential event space going well. Too small for AC2019 but will make a fabulous roadshow. Anyone in SF want to lead a roadshow? Congrats to Sally for landing Tencent as a Platinum sponsor. And Congrats to Ted Liu for renewing Alibaba as a Silver. SK is providing Ambassador Training a mandatory requirement for Sponsorship Ambassadors. Ted Liu and Craig Russell are queued to take this training during AC18. Targeted Sponsorship policy revised in light of the concern over the trusted by logo given to a minor sponsor. The policy grandfathered the past items and restricts them going forward. “The ASF does not allow endorsements, official quotes, blogs, press releases, and similar public statements regarding sponsorship in any manner except as specified as official benefits of the sponsorship program. While existing blogs and endorsement are hereby grandfathered as of August 2018, going forward, there are no sponsor benefits for any sponsorship, targeted or normal, for values below bronze sponsorship including in-kind donations for Infrastructure. All statements for sponsorship shall continue to be vetted and approved by VP Press & Media before publication.” We have a concerted bad actor trying to get access to the ASF who has been impersonating Phil Steitz. Please be careful. The committee is looking at using CRM software for fundraising communications with sponsors. Corporate Items: Certificate of Status from Delaware received COR from IRS requested for Emerio sponsorship D&O Insurance renewed
Fundraising continues to go well. We have shared with sponsors that Daniel and Kevin will be traveling for various events and are happy to meet and engage with them. - Daniel - OSCON, Portland, Jul 16-19 - Kevin - Google NEXT, San Francisco, Jul 24-26 - Daniel - Open Source Summit NA, Vancouver, Aug 29-31 - Lots of folks - ApacheCon NA, Montreal, Sep 24-27 Work for additional bronze ambassador support from Tom is still delayed Committee meetings continue to occur monthly. Last was held on June 19th continued to June 27th. Work helping fundraise sponsors for Apache Events is going well and to-date tallies about $164K. AC2018 is effectively sold out for sponsors. Planners meetings weekly and have a number of sponsors highly interested in AC2019 NA as well as AC2019 EU Continue groundwork on fundraising for an OSS event in Africa Sally is working with Hopsie on some issues in the donation receipts. Donation for Microsoft O365 was sidelined because Microsoft got the opinion we were in Vatican City and started sending us everything in Italian. They have approved us on an alternate domain and they are working with their technical support to delete the Italian one and swap the alternate into place. We have a new Platinum sponsor onboarding thanks especially to SK. Attended the TechExpo Cyber Security Job Fair & Cyber Security Summit. Work helping NetBeans with a sponsorship Drafted Goals for FY 2019 - Sponsors+Events - Endowment (paused until Fall) - Targeted sponsorship - Look at using Zoho or Salesforce more formally - Work on additional sectors: Wall Street & Insurance. Tom suggests Healthcare as well. - Automate the Thanks page additions/removals/notifications of about to expire - Create a signature block that includes links for funding the ASF and ask members to include it in their sigs - Continue the now monthly fundraising committee meetings - Work on an OSS event in 2019 (or 2020 if that's too aggressive) in Africa Repeats Kept From FY2018: - Setup Sponsor Soiree - Capture foundation/Fundraising/sponsor-contact.yaml to ??? master spreadsheet
Daniel Ruggeri:
A successful month in terms of day-to-day fundraising
activities as well as thoughtful conversations around expanding fundraising
and solidifying our future.
Endowment Conversations
* We have broached the topic of "Should we pursue an endowment?" with the
membership at large. Lots of feedback and conversation ensued resulting in
the gathering of data into a starting point document.
* Several folks have engaged to lend their expertise and help shape the
potential plan on the fundraising@ list.
* A proposal has been drafted to re-purpose a portion of the fundraising
budget to focus specifically on examining the idea of and potential planning
for establishing an endowment.
* Conversations are beginning on what this might mean to our outreach (Sponsor
Relations) activities
Other day to day:
* Confusion around "Sponsor+" and "Platinum+" terminology was held resulting
in a finalized name of "Sponsor + Events". Key takeaway: This is not a new
level of sponsorship or new fundraising program - just a way to bundle and
recognize sponsors for the expanded support.
* "Sponsor + Events" conversations with VP Marketing & Publicity as well as VP
Conferences have been held to ensure alignment.
* Ideas of running a yearly, more visible campaign (colloquially referred to
as "Super Thermometer Campaign") as well as using a formal IT system for
sponsor tracking and handling were initially discussed, but tabled due to
the endowment conversations.
* Strong fundraising work this month. We have some excitement due to new,
returning and renewing sponsors.
KAM:
Overall, fundraising continues to go well. Some small points: Work for
additional bronze ambassador support from Tom is delayed pending both a
contract vehicle from Virtual as well as discussions around a pivot to use
the budget for a VP, Finance role. Committee meetings continue to occur
monthly. Continue improving our fundraising procedures and working on our
playbook website. Daniel Ruggeri now has access to my private notes and task
tracking system. The ASF Sponsor Benefits is now cleaned up and consistent
with the slide deck.
And now bigger points:
- Sponsor.apache.org is now fixed. Thanks Infra!
- The minimum for Hopsie donations is now working at $5. Otherwise, donating a
dollar nets us a few cents.
- Submitted annual report for Fundraising to SK:
2018 FUNDRAISING REPORT by Kevin A. McGrail aka KAM
As always, we would like to start our fundraising report by thanking our
sponsors for their continued support. As a 501(c)(3) charity, our sponsors
are our sole source of funding. We could not do it without them!
For fiscal year 2018, thanks to our generous sponsors, we finished with a
positive net income and raised 150% of our goals. We also benefited from an
additional large donation that netted just under $900K from the Pineapple
Fund which opened up the ability to explore endowments for the long-term
viability of the Apache Software Foundation.
In fact, this year has been all about bringing new ideas to the sponsorship
program.
In the first quarter, the ASF Fundraising team welcomed Kevin A. McGrail to
the role of VP Fundraising after he worked to launch our individual sponsor
program with Hopsie in his role as Assistant Treasurer. After brainstorming
ideas at two face to face meetings, we identified a lot of points where we
could improve things and set ambitious goals for the year.
In the second quarter, we worked to refine our Targeted Sponsorship program
that recognizes sponsors who support us in ways beyond normal sponsorship.
Donated software, credits for cloud servers, graphical work, travel
assistance, legal support and more!
We also looked at creating a closely related company to help the Apache
Software Foundation do things outside of our 501(c)(3) and support the
foundation. We decided against doing so but it was a valuable exercise.
In the third quarter, we launched our new thanks page including Targeted
Sponsorship. We also began heavily working on three Apache events for 2018:
ApacheCon 2018 North America in Montreal in September, the Apache 2018 EU
Roadshow in Berlin in June and the Apache 2018 US Roadshow in Washington, DC
in October.
The DC Roadshow is one of the first, if not the first event that we are
looking to provide a career fair at the same time as we have a day long track
on open source!
Visit https://apachecon.com for more information. We hope to see you at one
if not all of the events.
Finally, we increased our sponsorship rates for the first time in our 18 year
history.
In the fourth quarter, we began working on the concept of an endowment in
earnest which continues with lots of debate. Looking back over the whole
year, we had a lot of small but important news: We added routine committee
meetings.
We were chosen by Amazon for early access to Alexa Donations with Amazon Pay
("Make a donation to the Apache Software Foundation").
We began asking for multi-year commitments to bring more stability to
operations.
We grew the ambassador program to make sure our sponsors each have a contact
to improve two-way communications.
We expanded our work with Virtual to continue improving our operations,
fundraising & accounting. This has been a wonderful partnership that we are
working to expand again further.
We completed our first ever audit with an unqualified status and brought our
Guidestar profile up to Gold status.
And finally, to recognize our “Apache Family”, we want to recognize the
support of the following sponsors:
8 Platinum Sponsors: Cloudera, Comcast, Facebook, Google, LeaseWeb,
Microsoft, Oath & the Pineapple Fund.
9 Gold Sponsors: Anonymous (we know who you are!), ARM, Bloomberg,
Hortonworks, Huawei, IBM, Indeed, ODPI & Pivotal.
8 Silver Sponsors: Aetna, Budget Direct, Capital One, Cerner, Inspur, Private
Internet Access, Red Hat, Target & Union Investment.
14 Bronze Sponsors: Airport Rentals, The Blog Starter, Casino Bonus,
Bookmakers, Casino2k, Emerio, HostChecka.com, HostingAdvice.com, HostPapa Web
Hosting, The Linux Foundation, Mobile Slots, SCAMS.info, Site Builder Report,
Twitter & Web Hosting Secret Revealed
&
4 Platinum Targeted Sponsors: Microsoft, Oath, OSU Open Source Labs &
Sonatype.
5 Gold Targeted Sponsors: Atlassian, The CrytpoFund, Datadog, PhoenixNAP &
Quenda.
3 Silver Targeted Sponsors: Amazon Web Services, Hotwax Systems & Rackspace.
11 Bronze Targeted Sponsors: Assembla, Bintray, Education Networks of
America, Google, Hopsie, No-IP, PagerDuty, Peregrine Computer Consultants
Corporation, Sonic.net, SURFnet & Virtru.
And last but not least, our 2018 event sponsors: Amazon, CloudOps, Comcast,
GridGain, IBM, Linode, Red Hat, ShapeBlue & Talener. Thank you!
As we head towards our 20th anniversary, we welcome Daniel Ruggeri as a co-VP
of Fundraising. Together we want to express our thanks to our very generous
Sponsors who are crucial to the Apache Software Foundation’s success! Thank
you, thank you, thank you.
Events:
Attended BBW & FOSS Backstage for ASF to speak on How to be an Effective
Board Member: https://foss-backstage.de/session/how-be-effective-board-member
The show was a great success in my opinion. NewThinking is a wonderful
organization and the venue was great. Also had a number of meetings and will
have an after report done in the next few days.
After report at https://lists.apache.org/thread.html/9f6114a064e0250e7910b80c9af3f3a9b96d51495a2cf3be0c53ad98@%3Cfundraising.apache.org%3E
- Work continues on our remaining two 2018 Apache events including sponsor
agreements and pitches. NOTE: We are almost sold out for the sponsorship
for ApacheCon.
- Attended breakfast for GMU Cyber. Key benefit was support for JP who is our
sponsor for the DC Roadshow. A meeting is being coordinated to plan the
roadshow further now that the Berlin show is out of the way.
- (Repeat from last report): Planning to attend AC2018 to speak on Inclusion,
Meritocracy and the Apache Way
- Framework for Sponsor + Events (previously Sponsor+) updated and approved
by Rich. See
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1O4kz-OZY8UTXwtorctWwFe0OCZ2ChJ8vPVYva4-qoDc/edit#heading=h.sktiqud2p4nr
- Coordination for Huawei annual conference: From Chris Xie: “Huawei Connect
2018 conference has allocated one exhibition booth (about 6 square meters) to
showcase Apache Software Foundation during the conference. This is just to
give you a heads-up notice so that you can think about how you would like to
utilize this booth for ASF. Zhanghaitao(Hector) in the cc list is helping
organize this event. If you have further questions, please feel free to let
him know.”
- The endowment project is effectively on hold for anyone outside the
foundation. Additional Key points:
Copied Sam & Roman’s notes into the overview doc. Spoke to Myrle’s mother
about the endowment. She has recommended we talk to John H. Taylor
Consulting. Sam’s goal is to create a new role, VP Finance with a goal of
having an endowment ready for a board consideration in the Fall. Roman
obtained a proposal from the Jewish Community Foundation that he’s having
vetted to share further.
- Discussions with Dito continue about bringing GAM
https://github.com/jay0lee/GAM under the ASF Umbrella
- Two Recommendations for the Board from our events discussion:
#1 - For next year, the budget should include the max risk exposure assuming
worst case scenarios: There is a concern that events are beyond the level of
risk exposure that the budget was intended to allow for due to unclear
processes at the ASF for signatory privileges:
https://lists.apache.org/thread.html/af9 5e4303d2b7801a1d2da3f4841133b33b4583b8494da98859cac1b@%3Cboard.apache.org%3E
Clarify if budgets are based on the Net or Gross and if Net, then also
include a maximum risk exposure. Real World Recommendation: The ASF CY 2019
Event Budget should be revised for a Net Loss of 100K with a max signature
authority of 250K.
#2 - We need to spend money from sponsors.
https://lists.apache.org/thread.html/66b 77312d1281c5a68867dd3c8b87c91a4bc51bd18137dac56fe7829@%3Cboard.apache.org%3E
We cannot simply grow a hoard of cash. Losing money on events around the
world with a variety of roadshows and apachecon is a good implementation of
our mission for OSS by educating people.
Based on past performance, ApacheCon is not a money maker and should not be
considered to be one. However, it is an amazing event that should be
considered a success based on attendance not profit.
As such, we recommend the board align the CY 2019 budget for a $100K loss on
conferences as an excellent and appropriate use of our sponsor funds. We do
not need to break even on our events as we raise funds elsewhere.
The Sponsor + Events and Fundraising improvements allow Conferences to have
financial freedom to run worthwhile events with less concern about the
financial impact and lower cost of entry for attendees.
NOTE: Only subsidize, do not give away free attendance.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giffen_good
- We continue working to get targeted sponsors for Infra and Legal
Fundraising continues to go well. As proposed, KAM has taken a paid role of VP Fundraising. Daniel Ruggeri serves as volunteer VP Fundraising. KAM reports to him and he will report to the President. Additional work for HALO to contact Platinum sponsors is also going. Work for additional levels delayed pending contract vehicle from Virtual expected soon. DRuggeri Notes: * Added Sally Khudairi and Tom Pappas as VP Sponsor Relations effective 2018-04-28 * https://fundraising.apache.org is being built out and is mostly stabilized - eyes welcome * Executed PCCC PSA for paid VP Fundraising (KAM) 2018-05-14 * Amended process for nominating VP Sponsor relations per [VOTE] KAM Notes: * We are working on the annual report due May 18 to SK. * KAM believes that the idea of automatically embedding and maintaining ASF space on *.apache.org resources is not tenable and is closing the ticket. * Committee meetings continue to occur monthly. * Work continues on our three 2018 Apache events including sponsor agreements and pitches * KAM CFP selected for FOSS Backstage. Planning to attend BBW & FOSS Backstage for ASF to speak on How to be an Effective Board Member: https://foss-backstage.de/session/how-be-effective-board-member * KAM CFP selected for ApacheCon. Planning to attend AC2018 to speak on Inclusion, Meritocracy and the Apache Way. * We are working to increase targeted sponsorship and move Leaseweb to Platinum level with annual billing so we don’t have this criss cross like now. Tom may have a more recent update as of the board meeting as this is ongoing as I write the report. * KAM also repeated our ask for Apache for Amazon for Infra on 5/4. No response received as of this report.. * Continue improving our fundraising procedures and working on our playbook website (https://fundraising.apache.org/). * Attended CANON Cyber security event hosted by Rick Howard of Palo Alto where we discussed the concept of an ASF endowment. Follow-up meeting planned for the 18th. * Some notes: pitched Accenture, talked with Twitter, talked with Bloomberg, pitched pivotal, asked DLA piper about targeted sponsorship. * Discussed a possible targeted sponsorship for mentorship with Andrew Friedman. * Coordinated ASF representation for Huawei annual conference. * Working to gel the Sponsor+ program for website and event recognition for sponsors for an entire year. Pitched to three sponsors (IBM/Pivotal/Twitter) * Twitter is 99% back on board as a bronze level but working on a higher level for 2019. * Quenda has been increased in status as a targeted sponsor. * Attending breakfast this week for GMU and will continue planning on DC roadshow * ApacheCon in Turkey was vetted and declined.
Fundraising continues to go well. In the first 11 months of FY18, *excluding the ~$900K net from the Pineapple donation*, we have received $1574.1K, (up $263,3K from Feb 18 and up $599.3 from Mar 17) which has the ASF at 157.3% for YTD. The budgeted Sponsor revenue goal was $1,084K for FY18. As such, concerns that we would be fiscally insolvent in 5 years should be largely put to rest. BOARD ITEM: I'd like the board to bless "1 - to set aside space on their website for an automatically embedded and centrally maintained ASF space." as a requirement for each project by approving adding it to the branding policy that exists today at https://www.apache.org/foundation/marks/pmcs Committee meetings continue monthly. Work on Fundraising for our 2018 events continues well. On behalf of ASF, I gave an Open Source Governance speech at GMU on 4/11. https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1xycSoPFDGlRui_cM-Ji-nS4yoaFc487axStVwmpzdTc/edit?usp=sharing Attended the CIT/Mach37 United Women in Cyber event on the 29th on behalf of the ASF as well as the WIT job fair where I met with a number of potential sponsors. Paper selected for FOSS Backstage. Planning to attend BBW & FOSS Backstage for ASF to speak on How to be an Effective Board Member: https://foss-backstage.de/session/how-be-effective-board-member Alexa Donations with Amazon Pay is now live. If accepted, as of May 1, 2018 PCCC has placed a proposal for a paid role of VP Fundraising. Daniel Ruggeri has volunteered to also serve as volunteer VP Fundraising where I will report to him and he will report to the President. Work continues on improving our procedures and our playbook website. Welcome to Ted Liu & Daniel Ruggeri to our Committee Work continues on our three 2018 Apache events including sponsor agreements and pitches A Hopsie security issue was ethically disclosed and resolved. *Recap of my Goals for the Year* As I finish this term in Fundraising, this is a look at the goals set at last year's face to face and their status. DONE VIA THE AMC PROPOSAL - Look at certification and training content DONE AND EXPANDED TO ENTIRE COMMITTEE - Setup a standing meeting w/Lynsey DONE AND HAS BEEN SUCCESSFUL - Pursue Multi-year commitments from more sponsors. DECIDED NOT TO DO - Setup Sponsor Soiree before the end of CY'17 IN PLANNING STAGES - Wikipedia-like fundraising drive, with stated goals. At end of Year. DONE - Document all our sponsors and contacts for billing and renewing with notes about how we got the sponsor DONE - Setup the Ambassador program DONE - Contact the sponsors about invoicing, renewal dates, likelihood to renew, PO Necessity and document their Fiscal Year. DONE - Formalize Fundraising as a Committee DONE - Finish the Benefits of Sponsors work that started in March F2F DONE - Confirm we are invoicing all sponsors properly STILL UNDER DISCUSSION - Fix the implementation of sponsor/apachecon/thanks/etc. via something automated like http://www.apache.org/events/README.txt DONE - Review Proposal from Virtual to expand their role as discussed at the F2F for Fundraising in Mar at CapitalOne. IN PROGRESS - Make a playbook website for fundraising DONE - Create recommendation to improve what HALO and Virtual do as well as look at the big picture to improve things. DONE - EXCEEDED - What is the big picture for fundraising for the next year? FY18 Goal: $1,074K for sponsorships (vs $968K in FY17) NOT DONE - Capture foundation/Fundraising/sponsor-contact.yaml NOT DONE - Get ideas for sponsors that Hadrian was working but not landed. DONE - Figure out the plan with nofollow links DONE - Bring Guidestar profile status up to Gold.
- Overall fundraising continues well with sponsorship exceeding targets for the entire year without considering the additional $892K from Pineapple. - The Sponsor Thanks Page with targeted sponsors is now launched https://www.apache.org/foundation/thanks.html - Switched the BTC Donation wallet to a Coinbase wallet on apache.org. No longer using the old wallet. - As the ability for me to volunteer as VP Fundraising comes to an end, I have submitted a proposal to the board to continue in a paid role while at the same time working to make sure the G Suite team drive is highly organized and things are well documented. Additionally, moderation for the fundraising & fundraising-private are now moderated by a group (thanks to Mark Thomas). - Apache Roadshow DC is shaping up nicely: https://docs.google.com/spr eadsheets/d/1tzHt55CUEMs-r-PDdCEk0-N7mqyTe9Ty5W2jy_YnLfs/edit#gid=979328350 Fundraising for our events is off to a nice start with an event contract created based on our sponsorship agreement and 4 sponsors with contracts in their inbox representing $52K if inked with many many more in the pipeline. - targeted sponsorship for one sponsor is now $5k annual renewable + $60 per year for 3 years, renewable after 24 months. - On behalf of ASF, I attended a GMU NSF / Smartcities event to identify potential sponsors and review the space for the DC Rodshow. Total costs: 55.97. - Also attended OSLS & Google UC Berkeley Tech Talk to talk with the Linux Foundation, identify potential sponsors, and talk to current sponsors. Costs $2,343.73 The next event was a Tech Talk at Google. Overall a good event. I spoke to quite a number of people about sponsoring the AC At Berkeley and OSLS, was able to support the International Women's Day. No more bracelets left and I think they were a big hit. - I am now out of all of the red do IT like a girl bracelets with the last 50 shipped to support the United Women in Cyber which I will attend on the 29th as well on behalf of the ASF - Attended ISSA-NoVA Monthly meeting to ask them to advertise our events, identify possible sponsors and discuss the CFP. Will be pitching two recruiters to sponsor and ISSA-NOVA will share our event with their members. Costs: 49.13. - Filed 3rd quarter report for Fundraising and working on the annual members meeting report - Minimum donation implemented (I think it’s $5 or $10) with Hopsie to slow down the abuse and small charges with exorbitant fees.
* Board Issue #1: Sponsorship of controversial sponsor as 3 year, paid in advance bronze sponsor going to landing page. Please ask for a vote as KAM’s view is: It's legal, they are willing to do a landing page, and it's nothing Amazon doesn't sell. * Overall Sponsorship continues to move along well. We’ve also hit $25K in personal donations with Hopsie. * Fundraising phone call on Jan 24 for Fundraising Committee. Meetings now quite routine and will occur monthly * A corporate contributor has CCLA questions They would like a schedule A for the CCLA that allows them to designate a person or email address to update things like how we use a PSA & SOW Also, Can we web enable the schedule A for the CCLA? And more CCLA Questions: Part 1: The CCLA only has names. Can we have it by email addresses? Part 2: IP Provenance enforcement concerns. Will find specific examples. * Planning to attend FOSS Backstage/Berlin Buzzwords - potential sponsor wants to meet there. Working on pitching more wall street firms for potential sponsorship The targeted sponsorship aka thanks2.html file is almost ready to launch. I’ve completed my audit of the records which was needed for the overall Foundation Audit. * Planning to attend the OSLS event but waiting to get work to approve the time off. * Anyone attending OSCON? We have a sponsor looking to meetup. * Lunch with potential sponsor is being coordinated * Working to get sponsors for our ApacheCon and Roadshow events. Sent draft prospectus to 5 sponsors for ApacheCon Montreal as well as the Apache Roadshow in Berlin and Washington DC. * GMU will host the Washington DC Roadshow: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1PlCM1gAehiNwNsXpH2Zfu9qFHeRX9zuODBfqdA6-4oU/edit * Fundraising issue with sites like Zazzle/Redbubble/Cafepress considered not under Fundraising but let me know if you want me to hit them up for a targeted sponsorship as a way to “repay” for the misuse. * FOSDEM VP Fundraising attendance after report Successful, well attended event. Kudos to Sharan for spearheading things. In addition to talking to dozens of people, in my official capacity as VP Fundraising, I did the following: - Attended Floss Dinner - Met with corporate contributor - Met with Google (3x's) - Attended GSOC Dinner on behalf of the ASF - Setup AWS Meeting for ApacheCon Sponsorship - Follow-up on potential sponsorship (thanks to Rich Bowen) - Met with Eclipse CEO briefly. Total expenses: 2541.93 USD * No update on the Sponsor thank you / fundraising event
Board Discussion Item #1: Can the board please discuss / vote adding the phrase “at no charge” to our mission? Board Discussion Item #2: Thoughts on licensing ASF commercially if people so desire? Daniel Shahaf pointed out https://sqlite.org/copyright.html. If people will pay for it and we give them nothing extra, any concerns? Board Discussion Item #3: Resolution to establish VP, Sponsor Relations is on a back burner due to the holidays and other priorities. Expect to raise it again soon, certainly before the end of the FY. ASF eligibility for Benevity renewed for a year. We closed out 2017 with $21,743.24 raised through 259 payments processed via Hopsie. Fundraising committee meetings with Virtual continue and are productive. Will move to monthly now that Sponsor Audit is complete and things are more routine. KAM will attend FOSDEM on behalf of the ASF. Will notify sponsors and potential sponsors. KAM planning to attend Buzzwords and FOSS backstage as well. Completed the pitch deck update that was in progress. No update about the Fundraising / MiniApacheCon Idea at GMU. College re-opens on the 16th of January and hope to have more movement after that. Sent a Happy New Year's note out to Sponsors. Had a multi-day outage on Hopsie caused by an IP block. Looking at changing how we proxy Hopsie as the fraud block ended up blocking our proxy. New sponsors continue to be added and thanks version 2.0 with targeted sponsors continues to be moved towards launch. A few more logos to add. Cloudera, Hortonworks also renewed. IBM is currently invoiced for 1 year and working on the future years. Working with Indeed as a platinum and cloudsoft renewing. Oath also still moving along and Bookmakers now a 3-year bronze sponsor Reiterating from Virtual report: “Regarding Sponsor revenue, we have received in the first eight months of FY18, $899.6K, which has us 82.9% of the way to our budgeted Sponsor revenue goal of $1,084K for FY18.” No update on the Sponsor thank you / fundraising event
TL;DR, things are going well and planned mapped out at beginning of my tenure for FY18 is being executed well. Board Discussion: Thoughts on licensing ASF commercially if people so desire? Daniel Shahaf pointed out https://sqlite.org/copyright.html. If people will pay for it and we give them nothing extra, any concerns? Resolution to establish VP, Sponsor Relations [TABLED and currently pending JimJ input, please table until Jan or Feb] New Silver Sponsor: Union Investment w/interest in Silver or Gold renewal next year. 3 Year Purchase order CY2018 to 2020 from CapitalOne for Silver Sponsorship Baidu is working with John D Ament to bring echarts to the ASF as a project. echarts is a Top 3 project in github data visualization tools. https://github.com/ecomfe/echarts New Silver Sponsor: Aetna MSDN aka Visual Studio targeted sponsorship is working again thanks to Ross and Microsoft. FY23 Projected Budget Submitted - https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1bd7FRaC5gmfLBYX4zBHU4vmNBVK3SRC4sKfyDRQx3fY/edit#gid=0 Audit of Sponsors considered complete. Largely reflected at http://www.staging.apache.org/foundation/thanks2.html Fundraising Quarterly Report Submitted - https://docs.google.com/document/d/1o2zf-PLanwXGhX9DS3MdYgn9eqVXrDEPKRC3IyC9y8M/edit Heavily Revised 2nd Draft of the Targeted Sponsorship Program was sent out for comments https://docs.google.com/document/d/1JhZEcty2fSx7ZxiBs41j3qOUrqsA7TvKmQ13ZZ61lJY/edit# NOTE: This program is already in use for non-controversial implementations. Reminder that the ASF G Suite instance is up and running available for use on request. Huwawei is also working to incubate one, possibly two projects now. Hopsie is now over $17K in individual donations. Have removed Yahoo! & HP from thanks page as we have not been able to pin down a renewal for many months (that’s a platinum and a gold sponsor) BUT we just confirmed Oath as a platinum for 2018 at 2018 rates (125K) so just about a wash. Some other notes: Hortonworks locked in for another year. ARM is renewing. HPE is unable to renew. Facebook also sent a PO for another year. Google is invoiced for another year and working with Sam on IBM for a 3 year agreement. Applied for Pineapple Fund. Told them if they gave us $500K in bitcoin, we’d name a future TLP Apache Pineapple. If it happens, we’ll cross that bridge but feel free to flame me on that one :-)
* Resolution to establish VP, Sponsor Relations * We continue to discuss new sponsorships and renewing existing. Nothing unusual to report but multi-year commits are helping both with less stressful large sponsors relations and putting Infra concerns to rest. The no-follow policy also appears to be getting rid of the SEO-focused tiny sponsors. * Raising Hopsie minimum donation to $10 due to high overhead with Stripe is pending Sally’s input. * Meetings semi-monthly with Virtual continue between KAM and Lynsey. Sally will also be joining them as well. * Directed sponsorship process continues to go well. Met with Infra and started the audit of all inkind sponsors and their levels. * Started creating the new Directed Sponsor levels at http://www.staging.apache.org/foundation/thanks2.html * Sponsor Agreement is now written and was Used to sign Union Investment as a Silver Sponsor! https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Pdksp-XuI1nbZfjW4n218WUJCe3Zpd8Ele4m1euXcok/edit * I am using this agreement with all new sponsors as they onboard. Should we send a copy to existing sponsors with no requirement to sign but so they know the details. And then require signing on renewal? * Future or Items with no Progress to Report: Attending FOSDEM on ASF Behalf Likely to attend Berlin Buzzwords & FOSS Backstage on ASF Behalf Sponsor thank you / fundraising event
1 - Resolution to establish VP, Sponsor Relations As a result of discussions in the prior board meeting, a resolution has been drafted and placed in this month's agenda. 2 - Fundraising Policy: Who Can Sponsor the ASF? https://docs.google.com/document/d/18xDS-IO1TG15ZsI26Wk5aXvsRhrNLMozrHYXjyvqaVA is now considered policy. 3 - Discovering more about the SEO / NoFollow issue and I believe it is now headed off. Have spoken to Google Web Spam via John Mueller about the issue, codified our no-follow policy, audited all sponsors, and updated the thanks page. as well as finalized our who can sponsor the ASF. In discussions with the more SEO interested sponsors, it seems to be an appropriate response that is working well. 4 - Hopsie Captcha is working well to stop fraud attempts. They are lowering it from 3 bad attempts to 2 and I’m considering the matter closed. 5 - Fundraising Levels as of 1/1/18 will be: Bronze: 6K / Silver: 25K / Gold: 50K / Platinum: 125K 6 - Meetings semi-monthly with Virtual continue between KAM and Lynsey. Next on 10/26 and thanks for Sally and Tom joining the last one to complete our sponsor audit. 7 - Directed sponsorship is moving along well. Assembla has agreed to be a Bronze Directed Sponsor for the SVN hackathon. Still working on policy and meeting with Infra to identify all their sponsors and their levels. 8 - Attending All Things Open on ASF Behalf (I have a work conflict and haven’t been able to pow-wow with Rich since August. Is anyone else going?) 9 - Future or Items with no Progress to Report: Attending FOSDEM on ASF Behalf Likely to attend Berlin Buzzwords & FOSS Backstage on ASF Behalf Sponsor thank you / fundraising event
Meetings semi-monthly with Virtual continue between KAM and Lynsey Good progress continues on cleaning up the sponsor records. Before the next board meeting, we’re planning to remove unpaid sponsors off the thanks page. G Suite instance is up and running - gsuite.cloud.apache.org If there are concerns about where fundraising is storing data, who needs access, etc. please let me know. https://blogs.apache.org/foundation/entry/success-at-apache-meritocracy wristbands very successful and very well received. Also posted re: Equifax with official hat on at https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/act-ii-equifax-tries-fails-throw-apache-struts- under-bus-mcgrail/ Shipments to people who requested bracelets is complete with two exceptions and my firm is donating the labor to process everything. Slide deck at the 99% good to go mark. Many thanks to Sally. Received the ASF Credit Card for KAM. Directed sponsorship to unify with inkind sponsors is coming along with discussions ongoing with numerous players. I expect to unify this and have a policy before the November board meeting. Attending All Things Open on ASF Behalf Attending FOSDEM on ASF Behalf Likely to attend Berlin Buzzwords & FOSS Backstage on ASF Behalf Thanks again to Sally and Hadrian for helping pin down sponsors as well as continued work from Virtual. We’ve got renewals coming, invoices going and some bronze sponsors adding as well. We lost some sponsors, gained some and renewed some we thought we had lost. Sponsor onboarding process is getting smoother with notes about sponsor agreement and automating the process more in the works Huawei talking to John D Ament re:incubation and potentially bringing some projects under our umbrella. Multi-year commit from sponsors is being well received and helping with getting Bronze sponsors who are committed to the foundation’s long-term success. Passed the $10K mark in donations from Hopsie (started in March) Would like to give Ambassadors a VP Titles like VP Sponsor Relations Draft of Who can Sponsor the ASF? policy in Google Docs for comments: https://drive.google.com/open?id=18xDS-IO1TG15ZsI26Wk5aXvsRhrNLMozrHYXjyvqaVA
-Meetings with Virtual continue semi-monthly while we sort out foundational issues and continue the transition to KAM as the VP. As reported previously, we have identified large sponsors that have not been billed. If those sponsors had renewed and paid, we are easily in excess of ½ million missed potential revenue. It should be easily defendable that the expense of having Virtual onboard solely based on these missed sponsorships. - Launching a fundraising website similar to treasurer to help things be more transparent - Launched a fundraising-private committee mailing list so sensitive information can be discussed with appropriately accessible archives. - Have gone through the data in SVN foundation/Fundraising and archived old stuff and created a plan for other items - Have audited with Virtual the list of sponsors that they have vs what we have on the sponsors page. As noted anecdotally, we’ve missed a LOT of sponsorship over the years by simply failing to invoice. But we’ve been doing a good job of recapturing sponsors and in some case even getting some back monies. - Using Google Apps NPO edition for Apache for Fundraising work but will implement so any project or initiative can use it. Planning for gsuite.cloud.apache.org for flexibility for things like aws.cloud.apache.org or huawei.cloud.apache.org to be added down the road. - Working on identifying inkind sponsors - Revised Slide deck is coming along. Sally has been instrumental as always. Targeting 8/21 for Ready to Send. - Support inclusion in tech in concert with Media - https://blogs.apache.org/foundation/entry/success-at-apache-meritocracy - Monitoring the spam messages for fundraising continues to identify potential sponsors being blocked. - I'll be attending All Things Open on ASF behalf - I’ll be merging Infra Sponsors into a Directed Sponsors tier as the start of the directed sponsorship idea and to more fairly and equitably recognize different in-kind sponsors. Infra is looped in. - Requested ASF Credit Card with 5K limit in process. - For directed sponsorship, Sam, please ask the board to individually give ideas to me of: Things that shouldn't/should be done and a sentence of why/why not & Things that shouldn't/should be done and a sentence of why/why not Examples: case studies, coding, bug bounties, speeches, sysadmin work, legal, trademarks, infra NOTE: Please do not assume historical knowledge such as "the ASF doesn't pay for programming". It'll be codified in this policy so mention it. With this feedback, I'll prepare a proposal for the board for directed sponsorship to then discuss from there. - I'm gelling that the sponsor thank you event will be good in new york. I was thinking about asking Google to host because I know them and they might cater as well. And I can use the opp to leverage Justin's offer to help meet / invite with some wall street sponsor candidates. As discussed on fundraising, I think the thank you will be for sustaining benefactors who have given more than 500K to the foundation over the years.
Continue working to document and improve fundraising processes but I think things are moving in a good direction thanks to a lot of people’s efforts. Much of the groundwork in the past few months is working well without too much help. Specifically, Hopsie, Benevity and monitoring fundraising has helped with a number of fundraising items that would have been previously missed. Some new bronze sponsors are in the works. Some potential sponsors to reach out to it seems mentioned by a Gartner Analyst: https://twitter.com/merv/status/885616674631593984 Continue to uncover additional sponsors where invoicing was missed. Continue making strides in fixing this with better procedures as well. Big thanks to Lynsey, Tom and Sally for lots of help on this matter. Sally has spearheaded using mailchimp to notify individual sponsors of our annual report and similar items The Sponsor Ambassadorship program continues. Working to get access to TechSoup for ASF. Ross Gardler is on Vacay so expect that to be solved soon.
Tobi.com did not renew as a bronze sponsor and has been removed from the sponsorship thank you page upon expiration. New Bronze Sponsors: HostPapa and Emirio have agreed to come on board. We are working on small but high fraud issues where the consensus is that bad actors are using our site to pre-test stolen creditcards and the billing address. Using a new Sponsor Onboard Questionnaire: https://docs.google.com/document/d/16CpuFD6aQNs41CXSGwKUOhQRSNkCgk4Fv-Uwa-QaXd k/edit Well liked by Virtual and it’s had minor revisions. Will continue refining and move towards likely something like an automa form. I have implemented this as our Official Bronze NoFollow Policy: The thank you link for Bronze level sponsors will contain a “NoFollow” tag. However, to reward sponsors committed to the long-term success of the ASF and free, open source software, we remove this attribute on links for repeat Bronze sponsors or for sponsors who pay for a three year Bronze sponsorship in advance. With this new policy, I’ve shelved the Bronze+ concept as OBE (Overcome by Events, no longer needed) Ambassador program has been going well. Thanks to Sally for leading the charge. Working to get foundational issues done like contracts, audits of sponsors, etc. Making headway. Executed contract with Virtual to increase their assistance with sponsorship at a cost increase of $750/mo as of May 1. This was already planned and encompassed in the budget. Will be listing Hopsie and Atlassian as in-kind sponsors. ApacheCon NorthAmerica was advertised on ~15 project sites. It was missing from our own www.apache.org as well as people.a.o, reporter.a.o, whimsical.a.o (not sure whimsy.a.o counts as it's more of an app) & reference.a.o The whimsy team coded up a quick script to check https://whimsy.apache.org/site/ Therefore, I request board approval to Update the Navigation links http://www.apache.org/foundation/marks/pmcs.html#navigation to make it a requirement to include an Apache overlay div to avoid design or dependency concerns on all ASF web properties include www.apache.rg that is centrally located/updated The update of this data will fall to VP Fundraising, VP Conferences & VP Marketing jointly.
Requests: #1 - Confirm that Fundraising is a President's Committee. As of this meeting, the official members are Tom Pappas, Kevin A. McGrail & Sally Khudairi as well as possibly Jim Jagielski & Hadrian Zbarcea. We are looking for more people to help give a face to sponsors with the foundation. #2 - The ASF could benefit greatly from performing work such as certification, training, bug bounties, etc. However, I understand the reticence to doing so. Therefore, I'd like to put forth this basic framework that I feel could meet the Apache Way and explore these opportunities. There are numerous opportunities that have arisen concerning providing services, training and certification. These opportunities are not consistent with the foundation's mission and structure. Specifically, right now, we are evaluating a request "to A) create highly credible course content by branding it and B) working with Apache to promote that content." This is difficult to do under the ASF for a variety of good and credible reasons. As such, I propose a related but 3rd party corporation is started with the following minimal framework that is needed to take things further. I would ask the board to vote on this concept because even if it is a no vote, it will be nice to document it at the highest level and agree to disagree! - The creation of a new entity tentatively named Apache Media Corp (AMC). The naming is primarily for the purpose of this proposal. - The new entity, AMC, will be founded by X & Y & Z. - AMC will be seeking private equity investors. - The President & Chair of the ASF will be automatically 2 of the 5 initial AMC Board of Director members to ensure that it follows The Apache Way. Further, the ASF Board shall have the right to appoint an additional AMC board of director member for every 3 additional board members added. This is done for flexibility since investors may want a board seat as well and we want investors not to be able to hijack things either! - The ASF will license the rights to the ASF logo design and feather along with the exclusive right to AMC to certify products, training and certification for 2 years in the US and Europe in exchange for 15% of all income with a minimum of $20k / year for 2 years (silver sponsors) NOTE: I ask for 2 years so we can gain commitments to do this. I ask the board consider that we are committed to the Apache Way and give us time to explore what works or doesn't work. If it does work, there is guaranteed donations AND the ability to expand outside of thee territories. - The AMC will exist to provide services, training, training material, documentation, and certify said materials. It is anticipated we will be hiring existing committers to further their work and the foundation. - The close relationship ensures that the ASF is not providing any warranty or guarantee, maintains the 501(c)(3) status without concern and the AMC is solely responsible for materials and consideration are adequate to the Apache Way. - In keeping with the Apache Way, materials generated will AT A MINIMUM be open sourced after a vault period not to exceed 2 years. - The AMC will be responsible for all contractual obligations in these matters. - Contracts and the existence of contracts with the AMC shall be considered confidential. But the existence will always be available to board-private upon request to maintain transparency and that there is no illusion of backdoor deals regarding any projects. - A strict COID policy will be enacted at the AMC and any employees, consultants, contractors, etc. so if there is a conflict, it is fully required to disclose the conflict in dealings with the ASF. NOTE: This will not REQUIRE abstention. It will require disclosure. - Please consult the ASF attorney. A reputable, skilled attorney with highly relevant experience has reviewed this proposal and various ASF charter documentation and stated that there is nothing in the ASF charter that prevents this as well as nothing that stops a third party from doing most everything here. The decision to set this up is completely political and not technical.
Fundraising activities continue normally. Sam provided quite a bit of details in the President report, inclulding the fact that I decided to step down from the VP Funddraising role. The last thing to note is the increase in collection this month that brought us closer to our goal.
Fundraising activities continue normally. Renewal invoices are sent by Lynsey on time. Besides the issue with the SLA mentioned in the President report we have an issue with our two contact people leaving a sponsoring company. I got a call with somebody else in the organization and hope to be put in contact with the new person in charge. A small group of members is currently testing a new donation channel. Thanks Sally for taking the lead on that. I am looking forward to the F2F meeting regarding fundraising. Thanks to Capital One for providing the venue.
Fundraising activities continue normally. Hadrian and Lynsey got into a good working pattern. We have weekly status meetings to follow up on outstanding tasks. One of the main focuses is getting in touch with sponsors to ensure that we meet the targets. Last month we got a request from one European sponsor to sign a statement that we comply with European data privacy laws. The request implied that continued sponsorship is contingent on the ASF signing said document. There was a thread on fundraising@ to that effect, I had a phone conversation with one of our lawyers where we agreed that it is ok for us to sign. VP Legal stated that he's against us signing so I did not. I asked the sponsor for clarifications regarding the relevace of that document for us but didn't get a reply yet. This cycle we experienced intense debates about the future of fundraising. There were a number of opinions, nothing conclusive yet but the convesation continues. One task in progress was updating the ASF profile on guidestar [1]. Guidestar has a ranking algorithm and after my updates it went to 'bronze', then 'silver'. One goal we have is to bump it up to 'gold' before the end of April (fiscal year). Lynsey engaged the guidestar staff and is trying to organize a meeting to see how we could better use guidestar to reach out to potential sponsors. [1] https://www.guidestar.org/profile/47-0825376
Fundraising activities continue normally. Tom's reports provides more details about the financials. Hadrian and Lynsey, probably Tom too have a call scheduled for this week to sync up on the work. Once the details of how the tasks are devide are agreed they will be documented. The guidestar data is out of date and Hadrian is updating it, expected to be completed by the time of the board meeting. Sam asked about a proposal for increasing the ASF revenue and Hadrian is preparing it.
Fundraising activities continue normally. After a few conversation with Tom Pappas and Virtual we agreed to request a fundraising budget. There are a few more details in the President report. Assuming the request gets approved the following months reports will provide details about how the funds are spent. As in previous years we created a Holidays greeting card and we are in the process of sending them to all our sponsors. I expect this to be completed by the time of the board meeting.
Fundraising activities are getting back to normal. No issues require the board attention. We continued to get new sponsors at bronze and silver level. On the bronze sponsor topic, I started contacting all current bronze sponsors and inform them of the change in policy. I expect the whole process being completed before the end of November and all links restored to 'nofollow'. As Sam mentioned in his report, with the growth of the Fundation as a whole, there is more work in all operational areas, including Fundraising. While it is way below the levels required by, say, Trademarks, it's still significant and I anticipate the need for some budget to be set aside for Fundraising as well.
Sorry for late posting. I'll start with thanking Ross for his service and a wonderful mentor. This month was marked by a thread in an SEO forum that, as Ross indicated, claimed that the ASF is selling links. After a long debate on the fundraising@ list, the consensus is to revert back to 'nofollow' links. The plan is for VP Fundraising to first update the Sponsorship page, and then work with all Bronze sponsor to let them know that the link will convert very soon to a 'follow' link. For sponsors that will choose to withdraw the sponsorship, and I anticipate getting into that situation, will have their sponsorship funds returned. VP Fundraising will first work out a process with Tom (Virtual). After that the Thanks page will also be reverted to 'nofollow' links. We do have a few pending request for Bronze sponsorship to which we answered that we are analysing the situation and a response will be provided later. Due to the distraction triggered by the thread mentioned above, there was no progress on the initiatives mentioned in the previous report.
Fundraising activities continue normally. This past cycle was a more eventful one. There were a number of discussions regarding the future of Fundraising. I did not provide feedback yet, but I plan to do so. We continue to get requests for Bronze sponsorship which raised concerns in the past. As I mentioned in previous reports we continue to monitor the situation. The President asked for clarification regarding what exactly this means, what kind of changes we envision and what would trigger them. There are a number of changes we did implement and others we could implement such as reverting to 'nofollow' links for Bronze. What we did was starting to ask potential Bronze sponsors in a nice way about their story and the motivation to sponsor the ASF. In all the cases we accepted the sponsors seemed aware of what the ASF is doing and didn't seem a decision based on SEO stats. Another change was delaying the response to figure out, again, what motivates the potential bronze sponsor. For the trigger part of the question, the trigger would be a disproportionate amount of, say, questionable Bronze sponsors relative to the total number of Bronze sponsors. It is indeed subjective, but one objective metric is the number of concerns raised by the board and members who monitor the fundraising activities. As I mentioned in the past, it is my strong belief that sponsors should receive equal treatment and the ASF is also, if not more importantly, for the 'small guys' and by that in no way do I mean endorsing any commercial activities, but as we like being associated to the Microsoft, Google, IBMs of the world (list not meant to be discriminatory to other sponsors), we are considered by some 'small guys' as rock starts and they want to be associated with us and our values. I think it is only natural that we see more online services, but in time I hope to see hospitals, grocery stores and a range of other business supporting us. We actually had non techie (kinda) sponsors like Accor and Budget Direct for a long time. For more questions and clarifications I assume more of the discussion will continue on the mailing list and we'll include summaries in the monthly reports. One of the main focuses is outstanding renewals. On one renewal [1] an ASF member promised to get me in touch with the responsible person in his organization. Tom Pappas and I scheduled a chat next Fri to walk through the outstanding renewals and come up with a plan. I had a few conversations with Sally during the past month, which was a great thing and I believe we should coordinate more between Fundraising and Marketing. One initiative suggested by Sally who introduced me to the CEO of Hopsie was to use the Hopsie platform to follow up with sponsors and donors (probably of larger amounts, exact amount tbd). After a few chats, Hopsie created a free account for the ASF for 6 months, enough time for us to determine if the platform benefits us or not. This initiative is related to the document Bill Rowe sent, which contains a few valuable ideas. The second initiative discussed with Sally is to start a series of articles that promote ASF projects and briefly touch on success stories from the industry. The initiative would be sponsored by the VP Fundraising who would take the role of liaising with PMCs and sponsors to create and curate content, while Marketing would be in charge of editing, approving and publishing the content. The idea was well received by a few ASF members I spoke with and a couple of sponsors. If no objection we intend to start executing this in the next cycle. We intend this to be bi-monthly and we want to prepare some content in advance.
Fundraising activities continue normally. The main focus this month was closing two sponsor renewals [1]. Jim resigned as VP fundraising and that led to discussions about the role of VP Fundraising. I suspect the discussions will continue as there were a few proposals in the past about how to structure the fundraising work. Another discussion thread was triggeres by a new sponsor. After an initial offer to sponsor he came back with a comment regarding concerns of their board of being associated with questionable businesses via our Thanks page, due to a few, let's say atypical, new bronze sponsors. After answering his concerns he decided to move forward and become an ASF sponsor. I am convinced such discussions will continue to pop up, as I said in previous reports, we continue to monitor the situation. Like Jim mentioned, it is a frustrating situation that was completely avoidable. For now it's not getting worse so there is no decision or recommendation for change yet. Hadrian is in vacation with spotty access to email and won't attend this month's board meeting.
Fundraising activities continue normally. The main challenge and focus these weeks is the renewals for Google and Hortonworks. Jim already sent an email to Google and I reached out to Hortonworks to find out who replaced our contact, David (ex-VP Marketing) who left the company. Hopefully by the time of the board meeting we would have made more progress. On the issue of questionable bronze sponsorship we did receive more requests for sponsorship. Two seemed valid and well aligned with our values and were accepted. A third one was clearly just a desire to 'buy' a link referral from the ASF site and was declined. We continue to keep an eye on incoming requests, but I see no need for a change at this point.
Fundraising activities continue normally. During the past few weeks we got a number of Bronze sponsors that, while I am sure rely on ASF technologies for their operations, seem to be not very well aligned with ASF's mission (this is not an allegation, just my personal opinion). The concern, expressed on the mailing list is that such sponsors seem more interested in marketing related benefits. Another item that generated a bit of a debate on the Fundraising@ mailing list is related to a discussion I had with a cloud provider to offer an in-kind sponsorship that seems to be not very well received by infra@. While I will have to clarify with infra@ and its VP what exactly is we do and do not need, I started a more general thread on Fundraising@ to gather ideas and opinions about the type of services we would need as in-kind sponsorship.
Fundraising continues to operate normally. This month we got a new Gold sponsor [1], thanks to Greg who made the liaison. We also got a few Bronze sponsors [2]. The Sponsorship page was update to reflect a change we implemented last summer. More details were provided on the mailing list. Jim and Hadrian attended ApacheCon. I got a few leads that I believe will result in a few more sponsors joining soon. I know that Rich talked to a few of the same ones as well, thanks Rich. I didn't see the Treasurer report, but given this month activity we should be doing well.
Fundraising continues with no significant issues or challenges. As I mentioned in the past reports and shown in Tom's (Virtual) report, most of the sponsorships get renewed in the spring. As of now we beat the street estimates and are ahead of the plan in the last month of the fiscal year. This is due as mentioned in the other report to one payment ahead of a Platinum sponsor, but is also in spite of loosing a few sponsors this year. I am now working on being more persistent with companies that indicated that are considering becoming sponsors so that we avoid loosing some ground next year. For that Melissa planned to meet with me and Jim in Vancouver next month. I hope to have a few conversations with Ross as well. I also have a call scheduled with Tom and Lynsey (Virtual) for Wednesday (after the Board meeting) to go over the process and see what works well and what would need improvement. All in all, this was a good fiscal year for Fundraising and I would like to thank the many ASF members who helped out.
This was a relatively slow month for Fundraising, not much to report. The only notable events are us getting a new Bronze Sponsor, ChameleonJohn and interest expressed by another foundation to become a Bronze sponsor as well.
Fundraising activities are continuing normally. We are up to date with sending all invoices. After a few conversations with Virtual we setup a reporting system that I believe gives the feedback needed to fundraising. Based on it we can keep the fundraising@ records up to date with the authoritative financial records from accounting@. I am in the process of updating the records and by the board meeting they should be almost, if not completely, in sync. If other tweaks will be necessary, we'll address them later. No new sponsors this month.
Fundraising is continuing normally. The bulk of the renewals happen to be in the first part of the (calendar) year and we are in the process of talking about renewals and submitting invoices. The revenues increased as expected, we are doing better than in the previous months and I expect that by summer we'll be at or above the previous peak. We also continue communication to new sponsors and there are signs that we'll be signing on a few new sponsors in the coming months.
This would have been a good quarter, we acquired a new (gold) sponsor [1]. We do have a few promising leads and I am reasonably confident that we will get new sponsors in the coming months. Unfortunately, we lost another sponsor [2] and I have concerns that we may lose another one. For the year, we do have new sponsors: one platinum, two gold and two silver, so there are no reasons for concerns. We do have ongoing conversations with other potential sponsors as well, however seeing sponsors leave is a personal frustration for me. The bulk of the renewals is from Dec to May and I hope we won't have any surprises. Last year we sent a Thank You (mass) email to our sponsors. Jim (I think) indicated that we did have problems with our sending of mass email (in the sense that a few recipients did not receive it). The free edition of the CRM tool does not have support for direct email campaigns, so I will find a different way to do it this year. I will put together the draft in a next days and send it early next week. I was also on the fence if to ask the board to provide the budget to upgrade to a paid version, but this conversation needs to take place in a different context. Such a request may pop up in a future report.
This was an intense month for Fundraising. After a long negotiation we closed one platinum [1], and two silver [2] sponsors. We also made some progress in catching up on outstanding invoices. There is one platinum sponsor who indicated that he wants to continue the sponsorship [3]. There are two other companies that indicated strong interest in becoming sponsors. After last months report, there were a few threads on the mailing lists, a couple of them even constructive but no concrete actions yet. There were a few very valuable facts mentioned that I am using in my talks to potential sponsors that seem to make a difference (for instance the legal activities projects are shielded from). I hope something more concrete will be fleshed out in the coming weeks in the area of community building (non ApacheCon events, etc) which is ASF's sweet spot. While the outreach part is going very well, I am not very happy with the CRM part. After a talk reated to the way we sent bulk mail (for the annual report), I discovered that the zoho notifications are not reliable and at this point I do not trust them. I will need Melissa's and accounting@'s help for the rest of the month to reconcile our records [4]. I will also need Melissa and possibly Ross (advice) on how to handle the talks with sponsors prior to their budget planning [5].
The fundraising activities continue. We have conversations with 3 potential sponsors and we expect one to close very soon. Due to the concerns expressed last month we identified a few gaps in the execution and we are taking the following steps: * we are still behind on our receivables; if our execution would be flawless, we'd be on target, as Tom indicated. That is not the case yet. * we identified a communication issue as we do not know the payment status of outstanding invoices and as such we do not know if/when to send reminders. With KAM and accounting@'s help we made the convention to send bi-weekly reports to vp-fundraising@. * there is a lack of clarity on who and how to send reminders. I had a conversation with Tom where we agreed on how to coordinate it. * we identified a gap in the information about renewals and as a result, one platinum renewal fell through the cracks. The reminder is now sent, but we are taking steps to close the gap. * following on a recommendation from Ross, we started to update our process to consider end of fiscal year and the budgeting process of ours sponsors. Tom will provide the information in the following weeks (update: Tom just sent the list, didn't have time to review yet).
Fundraising activities are continuing normally. Google is in the process of renewing and we got a new Silver sponsor (PrivateInternetAcess). The accounting@ team provided a report of sponsorship records from an accounting perspective and we are reconciling them with our CRM records. We also agreed with accounting@ to get a semimonthly report out outstanding payments. I think it will be useful to include the report the number of sponsors that renewed in the past cycles and those due to renew in the next. I will start adding them with the next report, to make things easier to track.
This was a slower quarter reflected in a much lower income than usual. There are a few reasons for that, including a very good previous quarter and the summer. I don't think there are any reasons for concern at this point, nor a need to reevaluate our budget or direction. RedHat is now a sponsor (again) and I did not receive a notification about the payment. For the reason the logo is not yet up the thanks page (but it will be before the board meeting). I was close to sending a reminder, but I asked Lynsey first. We need to make sure communication works the way we planned. Last month I had a proposal to remove the 'nofollow' restriction for links for all sponsors (including bronze). In the absence of any feedback, I will assume there are no objections and will update the site accordingly. Another important topic is that we had numerous discussions with a potential sponsor, who is interested in a very large contribution, but they also need help that falls beyond what the ASF usually does (and in some cases beyond what the ASF can do). While the discussions will continue, and I have high hopes of being able to get them on board, we need to continue the discussion about our pitch to the sponsors. I heard the same questions from at least half a dozen potential sponsors in the past couple of months and they are not easy to answer.
Due to unfortunate personal issues I am a behind in sending the reports and reminders. I plan to finish it this week, hopefully before the board meeting. There are actually 3 potential new sponsors we are talking to, one referred by Ross, the other by David and one by myself. Things look very promising at this point. I need to provide some feedback to trademarks@ on the use of 'nofollow' links. I intend to propose relax the requirement to use 'nofollow' links for sponsors (only!). That means that allowing follow links for silver sponsors as well (others already use follow links). I am not sure if such a decision should be made by the President or the Board and whom else (trademarks@ maybe?) should be involved.
This was a slower and uneventful month. We are waiting for payments from a couple of sponsors. I started to work on a list of potential new sponsors and finally doing some outreach work, starting with a couple of organizations in the financial space. Pending tasks: * send letters to sponsors after the ASF's annual report * research what happened with a couple of unpaid invoices from last year
See Melissa's report for more details. I am not tracking renewals (or anything else) for infrastructure sponsors. During the past month we realized that this is could be a problem as invoicing for one sponsor in particular got discontinued. I am looking into changes in the process that would address that.
Fundraising progresses very well (see Melissa's report for more details). Most notable event was Pivotal's upgrade to platinum (announced at acna). The "Thanks" page has been updated and looks much better. Many thanks to Daniel Gruno for making it happen and for his attention to details (a few follow up fixes). This happened before the site update and although a bit eclipsed by the whole site update it is still great. Information about all accounts is now in Zoho. Hadrian is in the process of adding data to all the accounts and potentials and uploading all the existing documents (invoices and payments) in zoho for reference and accuracy of reports. We will go back and upload docs starting with 01/01/2015, but not before that. While doing that we need to add tasks and renewal reminders. The desire and expectation is to fully finish this for all sponsors this cycle (i.e. until the next board meeting). For the next couple of cycles the plan is to iron out and document our process. There are still very few outstanding items that should be taken care this week, hopefully before the board meeting.
See Melissa's report for more details. Since last board meeting: * made formal proposal to use zoho for our crm needs. * proposal was accepted, all interested parties got user accounts. * we expect to have all data moved from google before the end of the week * another proposal was made in collaboration with Virtual to align the sponsorship year with our fiscal quarters. The goal is to simplify both accounting and subscription management. * the collaboration with Virtual works very well and we're getting very efficient with the execution. Thanks Lynsey and Tom! * we will next focus on the process and iron out the details in Apr, at ACNA; most of us will attend; this is the major focus for next month * second is updating the "thanks" page to use Daniel's template; there are some (minor) technical hurdles in mixing mdtext and html. Ideally the page should be generated, but that's a longer shot.
Fundraising continues steadily. There are a number of sponsors who indicated that will renew, but are late to respond. I hope that more communication will improve things in time. We did receive payments from Bloomberg, Hortonworks, Winwork, and Samsung. We are putting more effort in deciding on the CRM tool to manage the process. Hadrian got actively involved had a couple of chats with HotWax Media. It is very hard to find a solution that will make everybody happy. Hadrian did research open source alternatives and is now researching commercial, hosted alternatives. Hadrian is close to making a formal proposal, very likely using a hosted solution. The proposal and hopefully a decision should be done before the next board meeting. We made a recommendation to update the Thanks page and Daniel Gruno provided a concrete layout proposal. The proposal was accepted and Hadrian is working with Daniel to update the Thanks page. Hadrian had a couple of phone calls with sponsors. The goal is to improve the dialogue with the sponsors and find out what sponsors see as valuable and expect from the foundation. We anticipate this to lead to ideas and proposals for improvements, discuss on the fundraising@ lists and report back to the board. Cloudera upgraded its sponsorship to Platinum level. Yay, thanks Cloudera!
Much of what happened in the Fundraising realm is captured on Melissa's report. * We had a few discussions about the CRM issue with Melissa and Rob. I am waiting on the HotWax Media response, but it's very likely that I will reach out to the Ofbiz community for a pilot project. * We started a conversation about improving the Thanks page. Daniel came up with a nice proposal. Looks like we'll soon declare lazy consensus and go with his rendering. * We are continuing the renewal process normally. * We identified new potential sponsors (a CRM, again, would help) * We are looking into ways to conduct fundraising campaigns in ways compatible with ASF's values. * Hadrian asked to be associated with the ASF on GuideStar (don't know yet if their GS Exchange is an appropriate avenue).
The transition from Upayavira to Hadrian and Jim is progressing. Already we have reached out to present (and potential) sponsors about the change. There were some hiccups during the transition, but nothing of importance. Hadrian is looking at ways to attract new sponsors and how we could run fundraising campaigns. Hadrian reviewed the fundraising@ threads for the past year and there are some good proposals we need to act on. Cleaning up our "Thanks" page is an example. Sally and Hadrian worked on a Holiday Thanks card project. We expect to send a digital Thank You cards to all sponsors this week.
Fundraising activities continued normally. See Melissa's report for more details. We are on track with the renewal reminders. Hadrian and Melissa had a couple of brainstorming chats on the tools and processes to use. They will continue in the coming weeks after ACEU. Records show a $75k income from the Sponsorship Program since the last board meeting.
A report was expected, but not received
See Melissa's report for much of the Fundraising activity. A week or so ago I mentioned to Ross and Rich that I believe it is time for me to stand down as VP Fundraising. The role has always included an element of sponsor liaison that I have generally neglected. Having established the basic mechanisms of sponsor tracking and renewal, which is now functioning effectively in Melissa's capable hands, I believe it is now time for me to hand over the reigns to someone who can better fulfill the sponsor relationship management aspect of the role. This is both in relation to our existing sponsors, along with pursuing contacts that have been made at various conferences, for example at OSCON by David, Rich and myself. I have no specific timescale for standing down. My concern however is more that the work that isn't being done is started, and that I cease to be an impediment to it.
== Metrics == An impromptu discussion was held between myself, Rich, David, Roman and Jesus and Manrique from Bitergia about possibilities for using their metrics technology. After consideration and discussion with a sponsor, my conclusion is that that data is far more detailed than we need, and that the system already built by Daniel Gruno is very close to what we need, and is based upon the same data as I had considered using before I saw the details of what Daniel has produced. Hopefully, we can extract data from Daniel's system to produce an annual report, perhaps with quarterly or half-yearly intermediate reports. The aim here needs to be to identify the impact of the Foundation on the world, and thus the benefit that a sponsor's contribution is bringing about. The data should be used to show trends of decrease or increase that can be used as the basis of some commentary. The idea of a 'health of the community' report was suggested by a sponsor. It was recognised though that whilst this could be incredibly valuable, it could be quite challenging to put together in a useful way. It would be good, also, to find an appropriate way to send this annual report to prospects, as it might help them with their decision making. == Small Donations == Whilst not directly discussed much here at OSCON, I have considered further our possible use of Hopsie, and I am inclined to make use of their service. It does involve spending foundation money that could be used elsewhere. However, the amounts are small, and we will easily recoup it. More importantly, this could give us a relatively straight-forward means to provide greater opportunities for individuals to contribute to the ASF. In time, it could give us the ability to to launch campaigns with fixed budgets targeting individuals. In a way that might sound counter-intuitive, I do believe it important that we give individuals the opportunity to give to us should they choose to - we could do much better in this area. == Concalls and Sponsor communication == I discussed my quarterly concall idea with a sponsor. Her opinion was that every six months, and keeping it short, to 30 minutes, was likely to suit the target audience. She also suggested a 'sponsor' mailing list that we could use to push updates to sponsors. I have considered this previously. With a 'reply to sender' set, this could work well. == LinuxCon Dusseldorf == The idea arose in one of our conversations that we attempt to put on a "CIO Forum" at LinuxCon in Dusseldorf. We would invite CIO types to a presentation that explains the benefit of the ASF to the world and the benefits of sponsoring us. Rich will be there, and for me to get to Dusseldorf wouldn't be too expensive. Rich will talk with Angela to see if this is possible. [Rich: Joe Brockmeier and David Nalley think that we could still pull this off for Chicago. The conversation was with Leslie Hawthorne from Elasticsearch. I have passed this conversation to them for now, because I'm out of the office this week and can't really make much progress on that, as it would take valuable time away from drinking homebrew on the front porch. However, I will resume the conversation with Angela regarding Dusseldorf as soon as I'm back from vacation.] == Immediate Actions == [ ] Rich to discuss CIO Forum with Angela
An active month so far, with preparations for OSCON, for which we emailed every sponsor to see if they wished to meet with us. Melissa has been collating the responses and arranging a diary. Google asked for help with presentations at OSCON regarding GSoC, which has been arranged. We have a 'pitch deck' prepared by Chip that we can use for potential sponsors at ApacheCon. I shall be collating some financial details to make our fundraising story at OSCON clearer. I had a call with a Fundraising website vendor that Sally introduced me to. Their app is very interesting, and seems very cheap. It could allow us to build up workflows for receiving individual donations across our projects, tracking the donations against source projects, and thanking donors, and potentially making requests to them for additional funds for future projects. Given the price, I think this could be worth considering for some point in the medium term future. I had a good conversation with a new contact at a Gold sponsor who has agreed to renew.
Fundraising has been very active this month. As well as a large set of sponsors who renewed, preparations have started for OSCON. Upayavira will be attending OSCON with the sole purpose of meeting existing and prospective sponsors. Mails have already been sent out to all of our sponsors to see whether meetings can be arranged with those that will be present. Given that, for the first time to our knowledge, the ASF needs to raise more income than it is being offered, Upayavira has prepared a fundraising strategy document that details how he is proposing fundraising be approached. Put simply, this involves identifying a clear story to tell to our existing and prospective sponsors, and then identifying potential 'advocates' who can help is identify prospective sponsors, and help us make the right contacts with them.
Melissa continues to hold the task of managing renewals, either contacting sponsors directly, or asking myself or Sally for assistance where necessary. Given expected increase in financial demands from Infrastructure, fundraising effort is expected, in a manner that the ASF has not, certainly in the last few years, attempted.
Fundraising continues to move along. We are on top of sponsorship renewals, with one platinum still up for discussion, but others in reaching the PO stage. Useful discussions were had at ApacheCon, both with those sponsors that were present, and with the Linux Foundation. Ross has been asking "what do we offer our high value sponsors?" The idea arose, that I propose to follow through on, to offer quarterly conference calls with gold and platinum sponsors. At these calls we will present some basic metrics on how the foundation is doing, raise any highlights, and ask whether our sponsors have any questions they wish to raise, either in public or in private. Other than renewals, this will be the mainstay of our relationship management. There were significant discussions at ApacheCon about targeted donations, which have been mentioned elsewhere. I continue to follow these discussions, but have yet to form a clear opinion.
As noted by Ross in his President report, I am glad to report that the VP Fundraising role has become an oversight one. Melissa is handling most of the renewal work, and Sally is handling the higher value sponsors. Phil is handling thanking our PayPal/Amazon donors. The work required for the VP Fundraising appears to have dropped to a much more manageable level for a volunteer, thanks to the work of the above named.
At the request of Upayavira, this month’s report is being written by Melissa. Melissa has been continuing to follow-up on the renewals that have been sent out. As a result of her persistence, some that we thought were “dead”, she has revived. We have received a Bronze payment from Cerner. As of the writing of this, we’re awaiting an update from the Treasurer’s office on any new payments. Melissa has reached out to Sam to request the Tax#/EIN# be added to the quotes and invoices. Facebook has sent a Supplier ACH Enrollment Form, which Melissa has completed and sent off to them. In the process of adding “thank yous” to individual donors on the “Thanks” page of the website. The renewals for Yahoo! and Citrix will be going out soon, as they are up for renewal the first week of April. Although we’ve been making great progress, it’s clear that we still have a lot of work ahead of us. I’ve (me, Melissa) actually been contemplating a better invoicing/accounting system to keep track of this. I think it would be in our best interest if we purchase an invoicing/accounting system. We might have to pay for a program, but it would be totally worth it in the long run.
Firstly, I would like to thank Melissa for her sterling work on Fundraising. She now has a good grasp of our day-to-day fundraising work, which is a great relief for me. We have received a Bronze payment from Basis Technology. We have also received a Gold payment from IBM. Thanks to Sam Ruby for his help pushing this through. Our next major task is renewals on some of our platinum sponsors.
Fundraising has been quiet. The EA is working with the VP Fundraising on day-to-day business. We have had a report of an incoming sizeable check which we cannot track. We are in communication with the vendor to locate the payment.
The main thing to report this month is that Melissa has got a handle on contacting our outstanding bronze/silver sponsors. This is excellent, as we can now be sure that things will progress as they need to with the necessary follow through. We shall contact sponsors three times, and if we hear nothing, we shall be removing people from the thanks page. As noted in the treasurer's report, we also managed to resolve the issue at PayPal, meaning funds are flowing into paypal once more. Thanks to Chris for his help providing the information required. We also established, with the help of Phil Steitz, the ability to receive donations via Amazon's payment service. We hope to extend our donation services to send immediate thank you letters, with the intention that this will meet US tax payer's need for proof of a tax-efficient donation.
Fundraising has been progressing, with Melissa's help. We have received a platinum payment from Citrix, and welcomed a new Silver sponsor, Produban. We are still battling to resurrect PayPal, and have a concurrent effort to build an equivalent using Amazon as the payment processor. We have managed to get past a major vendor invoicing system problem with the vendor finally accepting a PDF invoice We are still behind on seeing renewals, which needs to be our next task. Melissa has been extremely helpful in getting fundraising moving again. I have asked to have as much of her time as possible over the next month or so in order to work through the backlog. My intention is that after that, it can be maintained as more of a background activity, with Melissa handling a reasonable amount of the day to day fundraising activities.
Fundraising continues to be very slow (too slow), but we have started the process of transferring some tasks to Melissa. This will continue over the coming month.
Fundraising work has been slow again this month, running below the rate it needs to. I have been in contact with the EA, and we are going to work together to see if we can speed things up.
This month has been very quiet, after the activity of the previous month.
This last month has been productive. The updated system, a simple spreadsheet recording next actions, has facilitated a lot of activity with contacts, resulting in substantial progress. Matt Mullenweg has upgraded from Gold to Platinum. InMotion Hosting have renewed their silver sponsorship. We have submitted two other platinum invoices, and another is ready to be invoiced. We have submitted three gold invoices, and identified one where the vendor system failed to pay, which they are rectifying. We have received an unsolicited offer of a Silver sponsorship, and have submitted a bronze invoice to another existing sponsor. Many thanks to Sally, who has been an absolute star in following through with many of these sponsorship renewals. I couldn't have got close to this result without her efforts.
Renewals This month has been a bumper crop. We have: * Silver payment from VMWare * Renewal from Yahoo * New silver sponsorship from Budget Direct in Australia * Bronze renewal from Talend * Gold payment from ComCast * Bronze renewal from Liip Last month I suggested a division of labour so that I can focus on the admin side of fundraising. Since then, I have resolved the admin side to my satisfaction meaning I can now focus more directly on sponsor liaison. There are automation ideas floating around, but those can be handled at a later date.
We have been approached by two companies offering us new sponsorships, one gold, one silver. I have been considering the operation of ASF fundraising, and some of the issues that I see with it. I wish to address them here. The most significant issue in fundraising is the lack of visibility into incoming payments. As VP Fundraising, I need to have real-time access to payment information. Without such real-time access of some kind, I am coming to the conclusion that it is not viable for me to continue in this role. Also, whilst we have some basic tools for tracking sponsors, they require quite a bit of attention, and the information we keep needs a lot of updating. I am finding it very hard to both keep the information up-to-date, and follow up sponsor renewals. I am therefore going to suggest that I focus on keeping info up-to-date, whilst soliciting volunteers to actually chase sponsors for renewal. I will happily undertake the invoicing and payment tracking part of the process, and will aim to keep complexity for volunteers to a minimum. I will seek volunteers for each sponsor as their renewal becomes needed. If you are prepared to take on contacting a single sponsor on occasion, please let me know.
It has been a quiet month for fundraising. A discussion about privacy of sponsor's details led to the creation of a private archived alias for vp-fundraising, which is accessible only to the VP Fundraising and a select few others. If this alias is CC'd on correspondence to/from sponsors, future VPs will have access to conversations that otherwise only make it into private mailboxes. There has been activity with two platinum sponsors, one accepting a PO, the other having sent a wire. A third platinum is lined up.
Fundraising has been a bit more active this last month. We have sent out four platinum invoices plus are following up one more. Hadrian has offered to help contact some sponsors, and Bertrand has offered to contact another. We were approached cold by a company wanting to become a bronze sponsor. I sent an invoice, but have not yet seen note of payment. I attempted, but failed to send out thank you letters to PayPal contributors. I believe I have the technology to do it, it just requires a concerted input of time (in short supply). Given the January deadline has passed, I would appreciate guidance as to whether I should still persist in sending these letters. I would also appreciate knowing whether a daily/monthly cron job could send out letters, rather than a manual task undertaken from scratch each year.
A quiet month. We have started the process of contacting sponsors for renewal, however we have a lot more work to do, as we have 15 sponsors up for renewal. So far, two are in hand. Sally has offered to do much of the legwork contacting sponsors, if I can provide her with the necessary backup information. This strikes me as a very workable division of labour.
In the last month, we have had two sponsors approach us requesting a renewal at the $20k level. Invoices have been sent. Having finally reviewed our complete sponsor list, I am surprised to see that we have 15 sponsors, which includes four platinums, that need approaching about renewals with immediate effect. There is no way I would be able to handle that workload on my own, so I expect I will look for help in January in approaching these companies. Suggestions welcome about how we tackle this large scale renewals. I appear to have lost the ability to see incoming payments. I will work further with the treasurer to resolve this, as being able to see that payments have been made is a necessary part of sponsorship tracking.
I have been reasonably inactive of late. However, I attended ApacheConEU, and did have a few discussions with folks who could turn out to be sponsors (some at higher levels). While at ApacheCon, I met with Melissa, who is now up-to-speed on helping us track what actions need to be carried out, and when. I also met Steve Holden - there is scope there for collaborating on sponsorships relating to the ASF itself and ApacheCons. The majority of fundraising activity in the last period has been supporting the ApacheCon sponsorships, which this time were able to travel through the ASF. I have started the process of discussing renewal with one of our platinum sponsors.
This month has been quiet. We have had a few enquiries that require response in the last few days. I have been lax, and have nothing much more to report. I shall be at ApacheConEU - hopefully this'll be a chance to kick-start some fundraising activity.
Most fundraising activity during the last month has been around the Calxeda donation of ARM based servers to ASF infrastructure. While we have watched this, it has not needed much of our input, as Sally has been handling their PR wishes. Other than this, August was a quiet month for fundraising, with a few enquiries that have not led to anything. We now have a reasonable understanding of the payment patterns for our platinum and gold sponsors. We still have a number of bronze sponsors that still need to be approached. I believe it is now time to start setting fundraising targets, to ensure we continue to meet our financial expectations. These targets will be set so as to maintain our current income levels, and won't account for growth.
We have had a successful month. Google and Citrix have paid, as has WANdisco. There was some confusion (on my part) regarding the WANdisco payment - I didn't realise the check scan was a sign of payment. I need to better understand the route that checks take in the US to prevent such events recurring. We have had a call with HP and clarified their payment pattern. We have also chatted with Google. Cat acknowledged that we are free to invoice much earlier. I will provide a fuller, more comprehensive, report next month.
I have resolved payment dates/cycles for each of our non-platinum sponsors. Three platinum sponsors and one gold sponsor have as yet uncertain payment dates. I hope to clarify these shortly. We are awaiting payment for two platinum sponsorships. RedHat has purchased FuseSource, and has agreed to upgrade their sponsorship, although we are still awaiting to hear to what level. Wandisco has agreed to upgrade to silver, they have been invoiced. We have a new bronze sponsor, Object Engineering GmbH - payment received and website updated. There have been various discussions around Packt Publishing, and the royalties they pay to the ASF on books covering ASF projects. We are in the process of clarifying exactly what has been paid for what title, however, we have recognised that payments have been arriving.
As of 9 June we have a new Silver sponsor, InMotion Hosting, who approached us a couple of weeks ago. As of 13 June, Matt Mullenweg has upgraded his sponsorship from Silver to Gold. The website has been updated to account for both. We now have a basic system for tracking both sponsorship records and prospects and the next actions required for them. Next on the Fundraising crew's plate is populating the remaining sponsor records (contact details, sponsorship date, etc), chasing the few folks who have offered sponsorship but not yet followed through, and following up on the few sponsors who are due for renewal, or due to make a payment shortly. Hopefully the Whimsy based systems we now have will make that tracking relatively straight-forward.
This is my first report as VP Fundraising. Since the last board meeting, I have been familiarising myself with the data that we hold about our sponsorship programme, and creating records for each of our sponsors that should allow us to easily track relevant events during the sponsorship lifecycle (invoice due, payment due, payment received, logo removal). With all this data in place, we should be able to establish definitive Sponsorship Renewal dates for all of our sponsors, and use those as the basis for alerts. This month I believe we received a payment from Go Daddy (silver). This is not confirmed, as we have a payment to the lockbox, that matches an expected payment, but do not have records to confirm its source. SPI have some money that was collected on behalf of the OpenOffice project pre-incubation. As I understand it, the OpenOffice PPMC is asking that this be donated to the ASF, and that some way be found that it can be used to benefit the OpenOffice project, in line with the purpose of the original donations. Daniel has helped with tracking potential sponsorship renewals in lieu of the above information. Greg is going to chase those three sponsors. Google is asking for a year-in-review, and a brief "what you are funding" executive summary. This is a resource we should have available for all of our sponsors, and will take some effort over the coming month.
WHEREAS, the Board of Directors heretofore appointed Serge Knystautas to the office of Vice President, Fundraising, and WHEREAS, the Board of Directors is in receipt of the resignation of Serge Knystautas from the office of Vice President, Fundraising, and WHEREAS, Upayavira has submitted an application for this position with positive feedback from the Fundraising Committee, and NOW, THEREFORE, BE IT RESOLVED, that Serge Knystautas is relieved and discharged from the duties and responsibilities of the office of Vice President, Fundraising, and BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED, that Upayavira be and hereby is appointed to the office of Vice President, Fundraising, to serve in accordance with and subject to the direction of the Board of Directors and the Bylaws of the Foundation until death, resignation, retirement, removal or disqualification, or until a successor is appointed. Special Order 7B, Appoint a new Vice President, Fundraising, was approved by Unanimous Vote of the directors present.
A report was expected, but not received
The fundraising@ group has received a resignation request from Serge, who has found his available time is insufficient for continuing with the VP Fundraising role. The mailing list is discussing potential replacements and hope to provide the Board with a candidate for its April meeting. Inquiries from sponsors continue to get handling by the volunteers on fundraising@, and we have signed up two new (bronze-level) sponsors. The group is working to establish some better management of our set of sponsors and their renewal date. We expect the new VP to help plan and execute on that, with a comprehensive report to the Board in the May or June timeframe.
A report was expected, but not received
A report was expected, but not received
SPONSORSHIP Huawei Technologies will start as a silver sponsor effective January 1st. Prepared and submitted invoice for 2nd half of Microsoft's platinum sponsorship. Worked on a presentation for C-levels not familiar with open source who need to understand how the ASF's purpose aligns with their interests. IBM will be specific target, but we have shared an old version for now that Jim had. Gav got the VMWare sponsorship pushed forward, we got the invoice made, the PO was issued, and payment is on the way. AMD's renewal invoice was prepared and a quote to support it. Payment is on the way. COMMUNITY Gav and Daniel have been great pushing forward and taking some initiative. I still owe a review on the status file data to make sure we're all on the same page and they can run with certain tasks. We were shared an issue with Open Office fragments try to claim that they would accept fundraising, but Trademarks and Press and the PMC are handling this issue and I do not see it significantly impacting fundraising. I offered to prepare the invoice for the GSOC money in the future since we have our own invoice process for sponsorships. In a couple of weeks, it'll be time to prepare the donation letters. This should be straight forward as I've tested that I still valid paypal account credentials and the Word doc that I merge to create these letters.
SPONSORSHIP Prepared invoice for 2nd half of 2011 payment for Microsoft. COMMUNITY There was a big uptick in people interested in contributing. Certainly ApacheCon helped trigger some of this, but was a confluence of many factors. Here are some of the highlights from these activities: Daniel Shahaf, Phil Steitz, and Gavin McDonald have each discussed and begun contributing on the list. This is prompting a re-org of my tasks to make them more distributed. So we've got... All my 2011 invoices (PDF and Word) committed to financial/Invoices svn. Fundraising invoice was improved and made into a template in foundation svn, which will let others help generate these. Daniel updated sponsors status file. Still need to double check some dates and add some contact info, but this will allow us to track. Spoke with Melissa (EA) about using her to remind fundraising@ when sponsorships were coming time to renew. We've discussed a new status2.txt file that will centralize the fundraising task lists I've discussed on the list. That will be put in place this week to allow Daniel and Gav to reach out to some renewing sponsors and test the process. Spoke on list and with Phil and Sally about a sponsorship prospectus. This will be about a 5-6 page PDF that can be put the sponsorship value to top corporate officers. Generally there's a fundamental shift in the workflow on fundraising@ to get more people involved.
A report was expected, but not received
SPONSORSHIP Added Hortonworks as a gold sponsor. Worked with PSW to process an invoice payment now that the international wire transfer issues were solved by Geir/Sam. Same with Liip as their payment had the same issues. Spoke with HP about how their server donation had gone. Working with Yahoo on invoice payment for sponsorship. Discussed other ways Cloudera could help the ASF, steering away from more hardware donations. Met new points of contacts for sponsorship at Intuit and VMWare. MISC Declined an advertising program with AfterDownload. My work life is starting to slow down, so starting to get back to my sponsorship duties.
A report was expected, but not received
SPONSORSHIP Added Liip as a new bronze sponsor! Processed half-year payment for Microsoft's platinum sponsorship. Processed Google sponsorship payment. MISC Commented on the draft by Shane of corporate recognition branding policy and will be following up to discuss this. Still trying to find time to fly out next week, but hope to be at OSCON to staff the booth.
SPONSORSHIP My time was very limited this month, so not too much new. I processed paperwork for Yahoo and Talend's payments. Also communicating with Google to sort out the paperwork for their renewal; I expect we'll be getting payment for that renewal this month. I'm still trying to figure out why a wire transfer from PSW bounced. I started reaching out to AMD and Intuit about renewals. DONATIONS A question on the list came up about donating to a specific project, and someone stepped in answered that donations are general. (Thanks!) MISC I had follow-up emails from someone looking to build relationships with OfBiz and directed them to that project's mailing lists. And I discussed possible get together with Sally and Shane at either OSCON or sometime in Maryland or Boston. I plan to get to OSCON this summer and meet up with sponsors when possible.
SPONSORSHIP We have a new sponsorship invoice template. I'm going to be committing the files in SVN to financials/Invoices/<year>/<datestamp>-<sponsor> naming conventions. I've got two to commit shortly. Yahoo! is officially renewing as a platinum sponsor. Calls and emails have it all worked out, invoice was sent and accepted. Talend is a new bronze sponsor. Marketing and PR reviewed Talend's press release. Talend made the announcement last week, we got the invoice out this week, and we're all set. The wire payment from PSW group bounced back to them. I have contacted our Treasurer, and we're looking into which bank had a problem or if there was an account number transcription error. Renewals this month: Google and AMD. DONATIONS We had one donor ask for confirmation that they'll get a letter, and was satisfied with the response.
We have a new silver sponsor... PSW group is a silver sponsor and has been invoiced. I need to get a logo from them to post it to the thank you page and then make the announcement broader. I hope to get the logo up before the board meets. We had an inquiry from a third party wanting a sponsorship spot on an Apache project. They were not looking for a foundation-wide sponsorship as much as a project specific relationship, if possible. I'm going to write the PMC to see what options there is to put a "vendors who are compatible with us" or something like that. We discussed the status of the HP hardware donation with the infra team Greg Stein visited several platinum sponsors in San Francisco... Google, Microsoft, and Facebook are all happy, if anything they would like to figure out how to help us more. Google and AMD need to talk renewals for next month.
I was very busy this month and did not get much of anything done, but have a few things to note. HP's server equipment arrived at OSUOSL. Some hard drives need to be replaced and infra@ is taking care of setting them up and addressing any issues. We discussed and clarified the number of platinum sponsors in our program, which is that there is no restriction and the sponsors at that level are comfortable with this. Helped coordinate a donation (not sponsorship) from AOL. I still need to reach out to the fundraising list as indicated in last month's report to get contacts with some bronze sponsors who are due to renew.
There is not a lot of public activity this report with several pending and renewals that I hope I can announce in next month's report. WANDisco is now a bronze sponsor. Helped push forward some trademark clarifications from Cloudera. I still need to reach out to the fundraising list as indicated in last month's report to get contacts with some bronze sponsors who are due to renew.
I realize this is tardy, but wanted to still send in a note. SPONSORSHIP We set up new vendor registration info with Microsoft and got the first half of the sponsorship payment. Due to touch base with them this month to talk more about how to work together. We setup ACH with Google and received the extra $75k before the year's end. Seems like we're in good shape there. Greg had good face-to-face talks with sponsors in a trip to San Francisco. Cloudera needed a W-9 sent along which was done. I got yelled at by IBM corporate because of they don't want us using their logo unless we want to spend months working out a logo-use contract with their corporate counsel. Their official "blue lines" logo is now off the thanks page. HP is sending infra@ two servers at OSU. The budget is approved and my understanding is that the hardware is currently being built, but I haven't received the shipping tracking codes yet. Lucid's sponsorship check arrived. VMWare's virtualization licenses have arrived. Facebook's gold sponsorship and most all of the bronze sponsorships are due to be renewed and are in various states of being approached. Hope to renew or remove from the sponsors list by next month. DONATIONS 59 thank you letters were sent out tonight. There was a 60th donation, but I couldn't get Firefox to Excel to Word to Acrobat to handle the Chinese characters. :( Again, sorry for the late notice.
Cloudera is officially a silver sponsor. They were invoiced and were placed on our thanks page. FuseSource is officially a bronze sponsor. They were invoiced and were placed on our thanks page. IBM requested a change to the image used for their logo to a simple text version that does not use their trademarked logo. That change will be made this week. Greg Stein is making a trip to San Francisco and plans to have face-to-face meetings with both Google and Yahoo sponsorship contacts. AMD's server donation was setup by ApacheCon as planned. DONATIONS The time for 2010 donations is almost over, and plans are set to send out the thank you letters early in the New Year. OTHER ACTIVITIES There's still a lot I want to get back into subversion as mentioned in the previous report, but this month became very busy with sponsorship relations and responding to invoice requests, which was great to see. Hoping to get more written down over the holidays.
SPONSORSHIP IBM is officially a new gold sponsor. We are working to process the invoice on their end by having us setup us up as a vendor and answer legal questions around the sponsorship. FuseSource is a new bronze level sponsor. We are generating an invoice for this as well so that they can move forward. I did not send updates to sponsors as I mentioned in the last report. The activity around ApacheCon consumed a lot of time and want to move forward on updating sponsors on what is going on. I expect to move on this in the coming month, and have begun identifying sources of information to send sponsors. I also plan to create an unstructured text file in subversion. DONATIONS We have about 1.5 months left for individual donations for this year... the thank you letters are good, but we aren't positioned to really push this. OTHER FUNDRAISING The new website launched, and I made a few updates to the thanks and other pages after this transition. I like that updates happen quickly, though I feel like there is a bigger need to work through some of the structural and content changes to the fundraising pages since the site is less navigation-driven. Writing out documentation in SVN of the fundraising tasks including W-9 forms, non-profit status, process for thank yous, list of contacts, etc....
This was a good month for fundraising. No issues for the board to address. BIG PICTURE This winter, it'll be a year that I've been in this role, so I wanted to give a brief recap. A lot of time was spent coming up to speed and understanding what was involves, and here are the highlights of what's been accomplished so far: - thank you letters were sent to 2009 individual donors - corrected and organized book royalty payments from Packt - new sponsors: Facebook (gold), AMD (gold), Basis (silver), Matt Mullenweg (silver), Lucid Imagination (bronze). I feel good about involving Sally and Greg and others to help develop and maintain sponsor relationships. I have an update for sponsors that I will be sending to them this week... I'm rather excited about this and have more info below. SPONSORS Lucid Imagination is officially a new bronze sponsor as of October 1st. Yahoo should have been invoiced last month, but I have a call scheduled with their new point of contact this week to discuss. I've heard that we are a line item in their budget. AMD's new machine should be purchased by ApacheCon as part of their gold sponsorship. At the f2f in Boston, I talked to Sally about having her help with sponsors, and she has been extremely helpful! I plan to talk to her and Greg and others at ApacheCon about how we can build the sponsorship program. OTHER FUNDRAISING I answered some book donation royalty questions from a committer who is directing payments from Packt to us. Shane introduced me to people at Lulu, and I am talking to them about the option for committers to direct their royalties to the ASF. Thank you letters are 3 months away! They should go out quickly in January to those who donated via PayPal, with some addition letters sent later once we identify the checks and wire donations. UPDATE TO SPONSORS I have been struggling to determine what to send to sponsors as a regular update, as all of them want to hear more about us and where their money is going. While there are a wide range of news sources on what is going on at the ASF, I recently came to the conclusion that the update to sponsors should focus on the foundation, not the projects. It is impossible for me to know about each release and which projects matter to which sponsors. So I will focus on the foundation-level news. For this first update, this will include: - A new board was elected (I'll include a few sentence bio on each member) - New trademark policy put in place - Infrastructure hardware refresh In future updates, I'll cull the members meeting notes and will look for other foundation-level news that would be relevant to sponsors.
Yahoo is due to be invoiced. I need to coordinate with Greg to confirm where the invoice needs to be sent. My biggest concern right now is sponsor maintenance. I feel like I'm handling most other fundraising duties well that are mostly unglorious paper pushing, such as thank you letters, book deals, processing new sponsors, etc... However when I first became the fundraising VP in late 2009, the overriding concern I heard from sponsors and other involved ASF'ers was that sponsors needed more attention. That remains the case as I'm not communicating to them enough. In Boston, I spoke with Sally about how she could help, and how we can coordinate to reach sponsors ahead of the game. I'm going to be sending them notes about ApacheCon to hopefully meet some, as well as letting them know about PR opportunities that Sally has as part of her tasks. We'll work to stay ahead of upcoming events. Greg, Sally, and I have been moving towards looking for more smaller sponsors. We think there would be small-medium corporations that would find the bronze and maybe even silver sponsorship attractive. This would lessen dependence on individual large sponsors, and we think this could scale, though we have yet to determine how to best market that sponsorship.
Sorry for the lateness of the report. AMD is officially a new gold sponsor (check came). Some tasks to work through to finish this off that are in progress. Matt Mullenweg upgraded from a bronze to silver sponsor. (I hadn't realized until the check came in as he had only mentioned he was renewing, not upgrading). Had a f2f with Greg about getting Yahoo! renewed as a platinum sponsor. We also talked about some other ideas of pursuing more bronze sponsors, with discussion to be started on fundraising@. We have a face-to-face planned with Sally and Shane in September 10/11 in Boston. Few key items: - Figure out what we can do to announce sponsorships below the a formal press release. - Discuss conferences that I should be attending or at least aware of ahead of time so I can prepare for when sponsors will be expecting us. - Discuss licensing merchandise. I'll be around during the board meeting if there are any questions for me.
Approved by general consent.
I've had another month where I did not accomplish much for a variety of reasons. I will thank Sally and Greg, who have been jumping in with sponsors when urgent issues come up, and Geir for helping out with oddball requests as I figure out process. I also appreciate the sponsor highlight at the end of the member's meeting. That was great. Things should get more productive going forward. SPONSORSHIP AMD is processing paperwork as a new gold sponsor, which took longer on their end than expected. They have blogged about it and I plan to announce internally once we're close. Have discussed buying some hardware with infrastructure, but asked them to hold off until the check arrives. Matt Mullenweg and HP paid as renewing sponsors. I have not done needed work on invoicing... of the non-bronze sponsors, Iona (I believe) is overdue for an invoice, and I need to understand the situation with Covalent. MSFT has been discussed, Google/HP/FB/Basis have paid, Yahoo to be invoiced in September. The bronze sponsors have not been reviewed. I'm still not doing enough to engage the sponsors, and OSCON put that into focus. I was late realizing this as an opportunity to meet up with sponsors and couldn't catch up. Going forward, Sally laid out which conventions are key to meet sponsors and possibly down the road, other conventions to solicit new sponsors. DONATIONS Still done nothing here, though at least we're in good shape for thank you letters. I still want to engage the community to get ideas on how we could encourage more donors. COORDINATION Geir has been great, I still owe another trip to Boston to meet up with Sally and Shane again, Philip and infrastructure are waiting on me to push on the AMD hardware, and I'm due for a lunch again with Greg.
Greg to update Serge on corporate purchases, merges, acquisitions and leads for new contacts.
This report is over the past two months. This is a sparse report as I haven't done as much as I would have liked, partly due to the health emergency but also just due to being busy at work. SPONSORSHIP HP renewed as a gold sponsor. Basis Technology is a new silver sponsor. I sent an announcement to announce@a.o on the Basis Tech sponsorship and am looking for any feedback on how this was received. I think some internal promotion of our sponsors will be helpful to sponsors and am working for a formula for how to do this. AMD is also a new gold sponsor, but they want to make a news splash in late June or early July. As part of this gold sponsorship, we will be purchasing an AMD Dell box in infrastructure. Originally this was going to be done as an in-kind donation, but to keep the support contracts simple, AMD will give us a check for the full sponsorship, and we'll make the purchase on our end. I have to finish coordinating this with the infrastructure team. DONATIONS I've done nothing to engage fundraising@ to think about small donors or a donation program in general. COORDINATION Shane, Sally, and Serge we're hoping to get together in May but that did not happen. We're hoping to meet later in the summer and build on the planning we did in February. Infrastructure was helpful in spec'ing out a machine for Dell and I need to follow up with them now that the deal structure changed. Treasurer and I have are working well together. Everything's good.
Greg to pursue a report for Fundraising
There are no issues that require board action at this time. SPONSORS I am working to close another gold sponsor. They have internally allocated funding and want to donate one server. I'm coordinating with infrastructure to have them say what type of server they'd like in the $5k-$10k range, and then this sponsor will be invoiced for the balance. Looking at the sponsor spreadsheet, there are several sponsors that will be invoiced in May. I'll be coordinating this with the Treasurer and will look to update our spreadsheets and review the process to make sure these invoices are sent and collected in a timely manner. DONORS The thank yous for 2009 were sent. I learned a bit about donor patterns through this process that will be shared with fundraising@. I feel I have the mechanics now under control to get thank yous out regularly and on time, and I want to now look to push for volunteers who want to strategize and implement a "donor program." COORDINATION I had a good trip to Boston to meet with Shane and Sally, though honestly haven't taken the next steps that I had gotten excited about while there. It's been an unusually busy spring for me, but it's on the list to do.
Fundraising made progress this past month and will update the board with respect to sponsors, donors, projections, and coordination. No issues for the board at this point. SPONSORS No additions or removals of sponsors this past month. I feel that Greg and I are doing a reasonably good job handling incoming sponsorship leads and are doing ok responding to existing sponsors. I need to make more of an effort to reach out and talk with all of our existing sponsors to make sure they're happy. The next step for sponsorship is to audit what we have. We offer 25% value in kind donation, and I need to confirm when each sponsor actually paid, compare that amount to the amount expected, and try to track down the value in kind portion when appropriate. DONATIONS Progress on thank yous, but not complete. The letter has been written, it was sent to one donor who was specifically asking for it, I've reviewed the PayPal history and have those thank yous ready to go out. I'm also discussing with Geir how to extra the donations via wires and anything else coming in as donations that need thank yous. While I was originally planning to, I ended up not involving fundraising@ in the thank you letter process. I saw the two benefits of involving them was spreading the workload and creating personalized thank yous. For the first point, I didn't want to share paypal data, so that left only trivial tasks that would take longer and more effort to delegate. For the second point, we were so behind for 2009 donations that I decided I just wanted to get valid tax record letters out and will focus on personal thank yous going forward. COORDINATION I'd like to use fundraising@ more. While fundraising@ is not a committee, I do want to share more of my work on this list to provide transparency and keep a record of what is being done. I have sent a few questions to the list without much response. I think by outlining specific tasks that I can get more involvement as I believe people's interest (beyond monitoring what is going on) is in specific areas. I think everyone would like to see more emails on fundraising@, but I haven't had a lot to say yet. The Board/Justin asked for budget, and we basically have none now that the work is largely done by volunteers. Similarly I was asked for projections for the upcoming year. I'm reviewing this and will discuss on fundraising@ to see if people have other opinions, but I'm expecting we do not see much change for this year. Finally, I'm flying to Boston on the 23rd for an all-day meeting with Shane and Sally to work out ASF-wide marketing questions.
Fundraising did not get a lot done with the 4+ feet of snow over the past few weeks. My part of the country is not used to that. SPONSORS The existing sponsors Excel chart was put into google docs but we have not updated it to make it current or have the other fields that we want to track. I took my first call with a potential silver foundation sponsor and am due to follow up with them this week. I still have plans to document the sponsorship process as outlined in the January report and to introduce myself to the sponsors. This should be done in the next month. I continue to think that sponsors will warrant regular outbound news-ish communication to keep them up to date on Foundation activities. This is still a few months out as well as logistically undefined. DONATIONS I got access to PayPal, and discussed some with Geir about how to cull this data for the necessary information. The thank you's for 2009 have not been started, and that is at the top of my list. I've outlined the 4 steps to the project as follows: 1. Define criteria for who gets a thank you 2. Write the thank you (form or otherwise) 3. Extract the donor information from svn and PayPal 4. Mail the thank you's. I will be emailing fundraising@ soon to outline the project and coordinate with volunteers so as to get this done in the next couple of weeks. OTHER FUNDRAISING AREAS There are a few other areas that fall into the fundraising area. Car donations checks are in svn but I don't have an audit process to tie the checks back to the donors yet. Book deals is the hot topic for fundraising. Geir and I were able to save a non-trivial royalty payment from a book publisher (Packt), which would have gotten bounced in the past. We are not clear how many past payments were bounced back. We may launch an audit to find out how many past royalty payments if Packt is open to resending some. There is a discussion on fundraising@ about how these deals are treated. Who publicizes them, what is allowed, who decides, etc... Related to this is a text messaging donation offer, which we are generally skeptical of, but I haven't yet come up with a good reason to say no. COORDINATION Three areas to touch on... Marketing trio's get together in Boston was canceled because of snow storms. Still trying to reschedule it. Fundraising and events could potentially compete for sponsors. There was a quick discussion to share concerns. Fundraising will look for alerts on negative reactions from sponsors and will look to learn which sponsors /would/ react negatively so as to prevent donor fatigue. The LDAP migration unexpectedly removed my access to financials in svn, but the infrastructure team restored it today. I have access because I'm in the "audit" committee... would it be possible to get a more straight-forward and accurate permission rather than via a defunct committee? And I got a new sig thanks to some prodding. :)
General agreement on the need to realign svn permissions.
Fundraising remains largely in an assessment and planning phase. I prioritized the areas I would work through as: 1) sponsors, 2) donations, and 3) other areas. I'll go through those three areas and then discuss coordinating with other areas at the ASF in this board report. SPONSORS This is going pretty well. Sally handed off all sponsor relationships to Greg Stein and myself. I had a face to face meeting with Greg, and he is interested in serving as the primary liaison to all existing sponsors and to help with closing new sponsors. Greg successfully helped close Facebook as a new gold sponsor. Greg and I will be using a google docs to track sponsors. We are looking to track key administrative tasks such as primary points of contacts, date of renewal, and last invoice number. It is on Greg's plate to put together the first revision and share with me. We will grant access to the google docs upon request to any foundation or board member. I prompted some discussion of sponsorship on fundraising@ with limited feedback. I will be emailing all sponsors individually to provide a second point of contact at the ASF, and also to solicit any feedback on the sponsorship program. I feel we will need to create some form of a proactive push of updates to sponsors, though the shape, frequency, and targeting of these updates has yet to be defined. I'll be gradually documenting the sponsorship process over the coming months, including: 1) sponsor coming aboard (coordinating with press@ and treasurer@, updating spreadsheet, updating thanks page, etc..) 2) sponsors leaving, and 3) sponsor maintenance activities. I have put the task of finding new sponsors on the back burner until I've gotten more of what's under the fundraising umbrella understood and under control. DONATIONS I define this as all the cash donations coming in. This is my next task now that sponsorship is getting under control. I've been trying to get the list of 2009 donors, without success. 5 emails to Geir over the past 5 weeks, and I only have received a partial list of transactions from mid-Dec 2009 thru early January 2010. I have not been able to get answers to questions on where this money is going and how I can get access to it, but this was over the holidays and I expect to push much more actively on this in the coming month. So next month, I get a clue of where money is going and put in place what I need to reliably track and report on this. Without this in place, I will not be able to effectively measure the impact of any changes to the donation program. I will look to review how we could improve the donation program later this spring. Some people have volunteered in spot areas, and there have been some suggestions on fundraising@ already and emails to me expressing interest before fundraising@ was re-launched. I will likely expect to reach out to members@ as this gets going. OTHER AREAS This includes book revenue sharing deals, car donations, and whatever else that was setup by temp volunteers in the past or just handed to the ASF. My sense is that right now this information is the most fragmented and unknown. As I get data on the donations program, I expect some of these activities will be illuminated. I expect this to be largely a trickle of money, and the debate to be had is whether the resources needed to track and manage these programs is worth the revenue they are generating. COORDINATION I'm flying to Boston in February to meet with Shane and Sally as the first official face-to-face of the ASF marketing team. I'm looking to understand areas of responsibility and build camaraderie to make our jobs easier. I'd like to ask the board for more access to the foundations financials. Access to the PayPal account would be very helpful and I expect facilitate some of the reporting I need for donations (and sponsors). I also do not know what else I need access to. I'd like to discuss where else money is arriving and how I could get access to that, this would be great. Slaps on the head accompanied by a path in SVN are certainly appreciated too. Also I have access to the Quickbooks files, but it would be easier for me if the ASF could move to the online hosted variety so we're not checking out and opening a static binary file. I may not have a recent enough version of Quickbooks, assuming the ASF QBW file is getting upgraded regularly. So if we're not going to move to the hosted version, I will likely request budget to buy a copy of Quickbooks for myself. As always please feel free to send me or fundraising@ any questions you have, and I appreciate everyone's assistance getting this going. Thanks!
Geir sent Serge the list of checks that came in to the lockbox, and the >= $100 amounts in PayPal.
Brief discussion on the use of Google Docs vs SVN.
The past month has largely been coming to realize the areas under fundraising, figure out who knows what, figure out who is doing what, and just try to make sure I have all the puzzle pieces on the table before I start fitting them together. My sense is that in the next 2-3 months, I will be creating a vision and plan for ASF fundraising. My work for fundraising is in an early assessment and planning stage. The sponsorship program will be transitioned from HALO to myself and Greg Stein in Q1 2010. Greg has expressed interest in managing and/or closing sponsorship relationships. Greg lives near me, so I'm looking to meet up to better understand how he sees himself helping. I want to give is a lot of thought that will go into what it means to be an ASF sponsor. Key questions include what levels are there, what we have to do to service foundation sponsors, and how is it differentiated with an ApacheCon sponsorship. I'm reviewing how other groups have designed sponsorship programs (defining "groups" very broadly to mean everything from opera companies to industry non-profit groups to schools to NGOs). The donation program needs to get in gear to write thank you letters both to show sincere appreciation and to give people the tax exempt letter some require. Phil Steitz has offered to help. I need to figure out how to get the list of who gets a letter soon. Any pointers appreciated. fundraising@ is now moderated by me, which has lead to some initial inquiries that were getting bounced. I plan to use this as a place for discussion but have held back until I have some agenda of what to talk to others about. I've talked to Sally and need to touch base with Shane about meeting face-to-face to talk more about our related areas of responsibility. Please let me know if you have any questions.
Geir and Serge to coordinate thank-you letters.
WHEREAS, the Board of Directors deems it to be in the best interests of the Foundation and consistent with the Foundation's purpose to appoint an officer responsible for Fundraising, including but not limited to ensuring that income from Sponsorships and donations from the public are sufficient to sustain the ASF. NOW, THEREFORE, BE IT RESOLVED that the office of "Vice President, Fundraising" be and hereby created, the person holding such office to serve at the direction of the Board of Directors, and to have primary responsibility of raising funds to sustain the ASF; and be it further RESOLVED, that Serge Knystautas be and hereby is appointed to the office of Vice President, Fundraising, to serve in accordance with and subject to the direction of the Board of Directors and the Bylaws of the Foundation until death, resignation, retirement, removal or disqualification, or until a successor is appointed. Special Order 7G, Appoint a Vice President of Fundraising, passes with eight yes votes, and one abstention. The board further acknowledges that officer's committee was established to assist in this work, initially consisting of: Greg Stein, Justin Erenkrantz, Upayavira, Nóirín Shirley, Phil Steitz, Sally Khudairi and Gianugo Rabellino.
The last quarter saw the donation of a sizeable amount of new hardware: 4 servers "loaned indefinitely" to us from IBM, spearheaded by Sam Ruby. HP donated a server in Europe by means of Gianugo Rabellino, and Cliff Skolnick donated of a server to be setup by Ben Laurie in the U.K as a CA. The placement of Jinx's link and logo is still under discussion, with efforts being made to improve communication on both sides. Susan Wu has joined the committee on the press side and has already sent out one press release, with a plan for regular releases in the future. This will be the last board report for the fund-raising committee as there has been a proposal to merge fund-raising and press activities under a Public Relations committee.
The last quarter saw the donation of a sizeable amount of new hardware: 4 servers "loaned indefinitely" to us from IBM, spearheaded by Sam Ruby. HP donated a server in Europe by means of Gianugo Rabellino, and Cliff Skolnick donated of a server to be setup by Ben Laurie in the U.K as a CA. The placement of Jinx's link and logo is still under discussion, with efforts being made to improve communication on both sides. Susan Wu has joined the committee on the press side and has already sent out one press release, with a plan for regular releases in the future. This will be the last board report for the fund-raising committee as there has been a proposal to merge fund-raising and press activities under a Public Relations committee.
Discussion and Approval tabled due to time constraints.
There has been healthy activity on the fundraising committee. Prospects being explored include contribution of UPS units from APC, registration for contributions from donated old cars (via several salvage companies), a new web site design submission for ASF (for which Nicola has volunteered the Forrest site as test bed), and exploration of a donation from HP. We have advised Intradot (French Linux distributor) to add a link to our contributions page as part of their documentation.
The idea of a corporate sponsorship, similar to that used by the Python Software Foundation, was re-opened. Greg noted that since he had a large part in that effort for the PSF, he would look into it for the ASF.
Approved via General Consent.
[from Chuck Murcko] Fundraising committee has not been very active in the last several months, on its mailing list. We have received a total of 1746.15 to our PayPal account since it opened, the majority of which is a contribution from USC.
The Fundraising Committee has decided to begin accepting donations to the Foundation via PayPal. An email alias and PayPal account are set up, and a revised contributions page is available for review at http://cvs.apache.org/~chuck/build/site/docs/foundation/contributing.html Once review is complete the page will be deployed and we can start accepting PayPal donations. Jinx artwork has also been received and added to the contributions page. We have not yet reached the threshold of receiving funds from Jinx sales; that point should be reached in the next 30-45 days. Next stage ideas for fundraising will be solicited over the next few weeks.
Members of the fund raising committee: Ken Coar <coar@apache.org> Justin Erenkrantz <jerenkrantz@apache.org> Lars Eilebrecht <lars@hyperreal.org> Roy Fielding <fielding@apache.org> Jim Jagielski <jim@apache.org> Sally Khudairi <sk@zotgroup.com> Chuck Murcko <chuck@apache.org> Fundraising methods to be explored: 1) Jinx deal and further deals with other vendors we need to get more professional with vendors in general 2) Approaching companies - Sun, IBM, etc. via contacts getting on 501c3 donation budgets 3) Charel - suggests training opportunities with BlackHat 4) Merchant bank account, Paypal - Jim to look into these 4a)Online donations - hosting our own secure donations page 5) Federal/State/Local grants 6) Resale of bronze feathers at bsdaemon? Australian outfit 7) Conferences 8) Additional ideas - talk to the Python guys, Barb Helmkamp, and other groups Self-sustaining income/infrastructure - easily $250-300k/year We should target a $100k/year *minimum* goal in the first year IRS homework on tax-exempt orgs needs to be done - Chuck General rules for 501(c)3: 80/20 rules for small/large contributors' donations Companies are free to donate equipment, etc. accounting counsel - primary contacts - Hanigan Bjorkman Ecklund LLP legal counsel - Duane Morris, Cooley, etc. CopyLeft is dead, nonexclusive deal