Fundraising Strategy

Our goal is to raise $1,1 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. OSE is currently under the fiscal sponsorship of Terra Foundation, see OSE Financial Transparency.

Fundraising Status

Fundraising Status - 0k from $1M (October 23, 2011)

Amount	Source	Timing and Comments
$100k	Kauffman Grant Proposal	Promised, not received yet.
$350k	Shuttleworth Fellowship Application	Invited, application to be written till November 1, result will be known till November 30.
$550k	USA and European Foundations and Individuals	Read our Fundraising Strategy and help us.

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 3 grants.

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

Short-Term Goals

till October 28

• Find at least 5 people for the fundraising team.
  • Currently: Nikolay Georgiev and Will Cleaver.
• Clarify with Marcin how the money can be spend (Nikolay).
• Identify at least 50 Foundations for OSE in the Prospect Table.
• Write down the value created by the design and prototyping of the machines.
• First fundraising team meeting - October 23. Corrections made if needed.

Oct 29 - Nov 4

• Write to at least 30 of the most appropriate Foundations.
• Identify 20 more Foundations for OSE in the Prospect Table.
• Plan next 2 weeks and 3 months ahead.

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.