Fundraising Strategy

Our goal is to raise $1 million from the non-profit sector till June 1, 2012. This is the current fundraising strategy and it will developed over time. Everybody is welcome to contribute and help!

=Strategy= Create a fundraising team to find Funding Sources appropriate to the OSE Work. Distribute the tasks to the people in the team and start working on them.

Funds from European Foundations will be received by the OSE Europe Foundation, see the blog post by Robert Anteau). Funds from USA Foundations will be received by the Terra Foundation - OSE is currently under the its fiscal sponsorship, see OSE Financial Transparency.

=Fundraising Status=

=Join= If you want to make the fundraising effort happen, please:
 * Join the fundraising team.
 * Find foundations, individuals and governmental programs.
 * Write grant proposals
 * Keep good communication between the donors and OSE.
 * Share lists of foundations funding sustainable projects - preferably
 * Share possible funding source for OSE.

5% of the raised money by the team will be distributed to every member of the fundraising team, if the team member has shown commitment and produced results:
 * found at least 10 foundations and
 * wrote at least 5 grants.
 * Note: these numbers are rough estimate and may change as the team gets experience.

Please send an email to Nikolay if you want to help: nikolay (at) opensourceecology (dot) org

=Team= Long-term commitments (more than 20 hours a week):
 * Nikolay Georgiev
 * Aaron Makaruk
 * Aaron's Work Log
 * Aaron's Research Methods

Short-term commitments (2-5 hours / week):
 * Andreas Gmeiner

People Interested:
 * Matthew Smaus

=Short-Term Goals=

till November 18
 * Find at least 3 people for the fundraising team.
 * Currently: Nikolay Georgiev, Aaron Makaruk
 * Find at least 2 people with short-term commitment:
 * Currently: Andreas Gmeiner
 * Identify at least 15 Foundations for OSE in the Prospect Table.

November 25
 * Write good proposals to 3 of the most appropriate Foundations.
 * Prospect Table.
 * Plan next 2 weeks and 3 months ahead.

=Risks= The minimum number of committed people in the team should be 3. A committed person spends every week 20 hours with fundraising till June 1. Which makes 3x20 = 60 human hours a week.

Risks:
 * The work is below 60 hours/week, then we may not be able to write to many foundations good grant proposals, and thus raise less money.
 * People join, but cannot accomplish the work due to unavailability, no commitment or inability.

Detection: Check the work status with everybody at least every second day. Prevention: Clarify engagement and if needed search for other people.

=Quality Control= Every grant proposal will be checked by Nikolay Georgiev. Advice from others and especially professional fundraisers are welcome.

=Funding Sources=
 * USA Foundations (most probable)
 * European Foundations (less probable)
 * Other Foundations
 * Government, in the USA. (less probable)
 * Individuals

=OSE Work=
 * local manufacturing
 * sustainable agriculture
 * ecological housing
 * local renewable energy production
 * open source hardware and software
 * long-term sustainable solutions
 * social enterprise
 * environment
 * education, skills building
 * social change

=Tasks=
 * Finding external help or advice for the tasks.
 * Finding people for the Fundraising Team from USA and Europe.
 * Find who is funding good/famous (OS) sustainable projects.
 * If an foundation does not accept solicitation requests, ask what the foundation is funding? and after that share what we are doing and see if they have some interest to help us.
 * Writing grant proposals.
 * Answer to: What value are we creating by open sourcing a specific machine?

=Documentation=
 * Every person in the fundraising team will document their work daily in a Log file, such as YourName_Log.
 * All found appropriate foundation and the communication status will be documented in the Prospect Table.
 * All grants will be under the Category:Grant_Proposals. Every grant should contain the content, HTML or text, and a linked document file as in Kauffman Proposal.

=Disbursement=

An initial disbursement schedule proposed in August, 2011 (now outdated by 2 months) is shown in the GVCS Rollout Plan, with delivery pending receipt of funding. Prototyping cycles are one month long, with 3 prototypes per product release.

=Other Business Models=
 * End-User Supported Funding
 * Create and grow the network of people, organizations and communities which need a specific machine and want to support its development by funding or other resources.