wperkins wrote:A little off the topic from video and current fundraising , yet I thought I'd share some ideas on gathering some extra income,,
4. (Shamelessly Cute donation pop up.)

Another possible way to generate some income is to create a smaller monthly goal graph pop-up that shows when krita loads, showing smaller goals, breaking up monetary needs into smaller segments to make in appear less imposing to individual donors.
graph could show Krita Mascot in various moods depending on amount of money donated,
lets face it who could refuse feeding the Krita Mascot lol. helps humanize the donation process and make it fun.

plus acts as a reminder that Krita is maintained by hardworking developers.

I really like this option . I don't that having ads would work very for us, not even ads on the website. It would be weird for people to see a Photoshop ad appearing on krita.org

Charblaze wrote:But those sites have a community used to donate. In other words you get money both from Krita and Kistarter/Indiegogo/whatever community. It's still worth to get in contact with those sites and ask their support team for an estimate of how much you can raise (yes, they can give you a rough estimate). If they say that for Krita reaching and surpassing 30k€ is very likely, going with them may be better for the added revenue out-weighting the costs.

Okay, good point. For indiegogo, do you have a contact address for me? I didn't find it, but I might have missed it.

Charblaze wrote:One of the perks for donating could be voting features priority. They could vote the list, development area (brush engine, layers, etc.), or the devs choose each time 2-3 features/issues and donors vote what should tackled on first.

What I was thinking is to make each of the 24 items separately fundable -- do you think that htat would work? Or would a polling solution be better?

Charblaze wrote:Anyway I believe any issue and bug pertaining the core painting system should be worked alongside new features development. I'm talking about issues like:
* Thin Line Quality
* Blur Brush improvements (https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=333227)
* Correct brush spacing when rotation is enabled (https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=329026)

[/quote]

Yes, definitely.

If I may be so bold as to make a suggestion for a crowdfunding platform: you may want to take a look at a self-hosted crowdfunding platform such as CrowdTilt Open. The Loomio project recently did a crowdfunding campaign of their own with it.

Some perks:
* Open Source platform. Repo Here
* Accepts BitCoin
* Custom styling as opposed to the style of Kickstarter or IndieGoGo

Thanks for that link! I'm investigating. I've already asked about their beta for international projects.

A note on fundraising itself: I think it's imporant to provide as many ways to pay as it's possible. For example, many projects say "donations are welcome", but provide single way to pay - via Paypal. For many countries/circumstances, this means "no way to pay at all", or "you can pay, but you will also have to pay 10% to Paypal and yet another 20% to your local payment system for them to do payment via Paypal". The same problem exists with all other payment methods, but if you will provide several methods you will receive more money

That's tricky, though -- apart from paypal and direct bank transfers using IBAN, it's really hard to find any other working option. I don't think I want to touch the various *coins there are -- they are too close to pyramid schemes in my opinion. Taking credit cards means getting in with some of the big fundraising sites, and I'm not even sure they support that.

I think, the first option should be to look up throw kickstarter-like sites (afaik there are a lot of), and choose one which offers more than one way to pay. Just an opinion, though

Boud: tell me and the VDG gang too - I wouldn't be here without Krita and whatever you need I'll do my utmost to fix! I have some marketers on the team and some webdesigners and graphics designers that I can conscript for you.

boudewijn wrote:Okay, good point. For indiegogo, do you have a contact address for me? I didn't find it, but I might have missed it.

They have (like kickstarter) a "contact us" form: https://www.indiegogo.com/contact/questions
The question to ask is, indiegogo's user-base has enough people interested in art making, paint softwares and open-source that they amount to more than 3000€ of added donations?

boudewijn wrote:What I was thinking is to make each of the 24 items separately fundable -- do you think that would work? Or would a polling solution be better?

Let's say, I choose to fund item #12 of the list and it ends up as the least funded. Since it's not popular it gets pushed back and/or a year may pass an it's not implemented yet. Where is my #12? I gave you money for it! Why are you not working on it right now?
Same thing if I fund #5, one of the most funded items. One of the developers may do #12 first because it's a quick task compared to the popular #5, it's needed for the general development, or may be busy with bug-fixing. Where is my #5? I explicitly funded it! Why are you fixing "Thin Line Quality" instead of working on #5?

Directly choosing where the money go is an higher incentive to donate but it could bring a huge share of headaches. Few choose this model for fund raising, and who does allows you to choose an area, not a specific feature, or split your donation in percentages. Pooling seems a more sane and manageable way for donors to influence Krita's development.

By the way, have you thought of giving keys for Krita on Steam or DDL of Muses DVD for donations over XX€?

jensreuterberg wrote:Boud: tell me and the VDG gang too - I wouldn't be here without Krita and whatever you need I'll do my utmost to fix! I have some marketers on the team and some webdesigners and graphics designers that I can conscript for you.

Yes, I need help... Especially help with a plan for generating buzz, i.e., marketing. And a nice design for the fund raiser page.

Charblaze wrote:They have (like kickstarter) a "contact us" form: https://www.indiegogo.com/contact/questions
The question to ask is, indiegogo's user-base has enough people interested in art making, paint softwares and open-source that they amount to more than 3000€ of added donations?

Done.

Charblaze wrote:Directly choosing where the money go is an higher incentive to donate but it could bring a huge share of headaches. Few choose this model for fund raising, and who does allows you to choose an area, not a specific feature, or split your donation in percentages. Pooling seems a more sane and manageable way for donors to influence Krita's development.

Hm... I am considering this approach because 1250 euros is rather easily manageable, and would give people a real sense of ownership. In the end, everything gets done, of course...

Charblaze wrote:By the way, have you thought of giving keys for Krita on Steam or DDL of Muses DVD for donations over XX€?

Muses, yes. For Steam coupons, that's more difficult, because that's not done by the Foundation, but by KO, and KO also needs the income to pay for their part of the development.

If devs are confident on delivering everything in time then please go ahead with direct funding of features. Just make well clear beforehand to donors how development priority gets handled. I proposed pooling as an alternative that leaves more room to devs for managing development, and a bit out of fear that otherwise some straw grasping trolls would start to slander Krita as it's happening to the Blender Foundation on Blender Artists.

If I understood correctly you plan to split the 30k€ by 24, and the goal is to reach 1250€ for each item in the list. Indeed 1250€ are more manageable, the only downside is the assumption that every item is valued equally by the community. In my opinion some items are bound to be valued more ("shiny" new feature, it benefits more people, etc.) other will be valued less ("boring" bugfix and polishing, niche workflow, etc.), so popular items will quickly reach the 1250€ cap while others will lag behind and offer a lesser incentive to subsequent donors. How about keeping the 1250€ goal but letting donations go over the cap? The amount donated above the cap sets the development priority of the item (assuming the 24 tasks can be tackled in any order).

@Charblaze This is a great idea about going over the cap. I agree that shiny features will reach their funding much sooner than optimizations, workflow improvements, or code cleanup. The speed that features can be done has a lot of value. I think we need to have some incentive that correlates to money better if something goes over. If an item goes over by 3,000, people are going to be wondering where that money is going - regardless of prioritization. Maybe we could communicate that additional funding will be rolled into features that "just" didn't make it (or something similar). As long as the Krita foundation is transparent about the income and how it is being kept in the organization, I am sure that is what the main concern for people is.

This might make donations more complicated, but doing rewards like "get a free t-shirt" if you contribute 100 or more. Maybe 200 will get a free t-shirt and a copy of muse. etc. t-shirts are great for brand awareness (walking advertisements), as well as people receiving something tangible for their money.

Use prefundia before you do an indiegogo campaign This might help http://thecomicstarter.com/2014/03/15/1 ... -do-wrong/ Also can this be a stretch goal http://www.dgp.toronto.edu/~shbae/ilovesketch.htm

Thanks pacman, that's a helpful link. I'm still working on preparing the materials and planning and things -- fortunately, we've got a good cash buffer already, so we can afford to do it right.

@charblaze: Yes, that was basically my thinking. If a feature gets overfunded, that's overflow for the other features in the plan.

@scottpetrovic: t-shirts with the mascot are quite doable. I've got a good and cheap t-shirt printer locally, and by now, Irina and I are pretty used to handling fulfulment... If we cannot handle sending out t-shirts for 100 euro donations, then the campaign would be doing _really_ well! It'd be the kind of problem I'd love to have.