Fundraising Session

Hi, this is an initial report from the Fund-raising Team launched at last week’s Resonate @Executive Team meeting.

At the session there was a call for someone to step up and volunteer to co-ordinate Fund-Raising efforts. After about 15 seconds of silence, I suggested that @brndnkng and I might make a good co-ordinating core for such a team. It may have been a bit of a surprise to brandon, who has been holding down a number of important roles already, but to my delight and to our collective good fortune, he said yes and we arranged to meet the next day.

We met for about an hour last wednesday. I brought an initial scoping text with a broad range of notions on it just to get us started with a general scope. We also scheduled a follow-up meeting for Friday. I mentioned this follow-up meeting in a few place on the forum and @SueJ and @Sam_Martyn both expressed interest and came through the Friday call.

The four of us looked again at the scoping outline I had shared with brandon and had an introductory round to get better acquainted with the skills and experiences we brought to the task and our interest in the mission of the co-operative.

Fund-raising is a very important, complex and inter-disciplinary concern that can both determine what the co-op is able to do as well as signaling how we go about it. Because of its central position among the co-operative’s processes, I have suggested that the space for this work would be well-suited here in the Cooperative category.

Other business from our first meeting:

Initial members @richjensen @SueJ @brndnkng @Sam_Martyn

While there are many paths to pursue, our key focus will be to organize a crowdfunding campaign in January, probably using our OpenCollective account. The object will be to extend the co-op’s operating runway at least 60 days as well as to communicate and offer community voice in the realization of our roadmap for 2022.

Link to initial Team Document

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Thanks for the meeting summary!

What time is this weekly meeting scheduled to take place?

Session Notes: Dec 22 2021-12-22T17:00:00Z
Chat with Action Items below.
Working Cryptpad Doc

Agenda

Check in. - 1 min each

Review/amend initial document 1. 10 min

Next steps. Check on these items. 30 min

  • UMAW/J@S
  • Opencollective
  • 60 days
  • Annual Campaign
  • Founders
  • Whales
  • BSA (Link to discussion. 1)
  • Newsletter/Email
  • Socials
  • Donation v. Support
  • ‘Always on’ - Donation button everywhere
  • Media Assets
  • Prior work / Melissa and Nick materials

Share action/commitments (next meet 2022-01-05T20:00:00Z) - 20 min
me says:
CryptPad

9:07
Sam Martyn
Sam Martyn says:

“BUY MERCH” Link needs to be updated to this:

9:25
b k he|him
b k he|him says:video - explaining democratic platform that people can join that has music
b k he|him says:video snippets/audio – fundraising/and building community
9:34
me says:Actions: Get Sam Open collective
me says:^
me says:brandon- open collection
me says:Rich to share.
9:41
b k he|him
b k he|him says:actions: compile fundraising materials in tandem w/ updating open collective page
9:42
me says:Action: check status of live website, support page and flow. - Rich
me says:Action fix - merch link - rich
9:43
Sam Martyn
Sam Martyn says:Actions: Consolidate funding information throughout the forum to add to the open collective about section.
9:43
b k he|him
b k he|him says:actions: develop script/fundraising pitch for mail chimp/social media outlets
9:43
me says:develop the script. check with storycore.
9:54
Sam Martyn
Sam Martyn says:Sam

  • Get Into Open Collective
  • Consolidate Old info &
    _ Use It to Update Open Collective Page

Rich

  • Get Sam & Brandon Open collective
  • check status of live website, support page and flow

Brandon

  • develop script/fundraising pitch for mail chimp/social media outlets
  • compile fundraising materials in tandem w/ updating open collective page
    9:56
    me says:Rich delivering core messages to Board and Membership.
    me says:Reach.
    me says:to devs
    10:00
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To set up recurring meeting for the Fundraising Team, check out this tiny guide I wrote up to help you create Events in the forum:

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@brndnkng @SueJ @Sam_Martyn Am I correct that 2022-01-05T20:00:00Z is the time you all expected for our session tomorrow?

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That works for me!

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Is there a specific reason why this meeting isn’t on the Agenda btw? Like, is it a private meeting or something where just the fundraising team should join to keep things functionnal and tidy?

Just posted link in the meeting box on top. https://meet.jit.si/rResonateFundraising

Cryptpad has a good looking Open Collective

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Ideas from Wed Jan 12

fundraising project

  1. Set up open collective with 20,000 EUR / 23K USD goal by end of February
  2. Resonate Donate page redirects to Open Collective
  3. Jan/Feb: Promote on social media and internally to pitch folks to support resonate, talk about current projects reach goal (timothee’s promo materials? z on socials?); build swarm/ambassadors to independently fundraise

Crew: [tbd]
Advisors: [tbd]

roadmap project

  1. Jan, Feb: Specify potential projects and get them estimated by dev team: upload tool, website
  2. Potentially launching first dev project in Feb

Potential dev projects

How to think about specifying dev projects and features in iterations

Dashboard 1: Polishing UX, handoff to artists for self-upload
Dashboard 2: Metadata upgrades via Tracks API 3 upgrade
Dashboard 3: Label Accounts able to login
Dashboard 4: Bulk uploads

Hi all, (@richjensen, @brndnkng, @SueJ, and anyone else)

In preparation for tomorrow’s meeting, I was wondering if it would be okay if I spent some time making some live edits to the Open Collective page that we could then review during our meeting on Wednesday at 2pm CST.

Normally, I would draft my edits in a doc before making any live changes, but I feel like my work process is at a stage where I need to start going in and setting parameters within Open Collective to communicate my ideas for the page and the crowdfunding campaign appropriately. Also, considering I am under the impression that many people aren’t consistently visiting this page (please correct me if I’m wrong), I believe that if there were any changes that I made that the group didn’t agree with, we could always resort to the previous setup, with minimal risk associated here.

I already have the appropriate access to do this work, I just wanted to get the group’s approval before I started making these more tangible changes.

Let me know if you have any questions or clarifications, and you can find more of my work on this topic HERE

Thank you!

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this makes sense to me @Sam_Martyn as the appropriate next step. i don’t believe the open collective page is highly trafficked. i’m ok with you making edits directly on the site

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Seconded what @brndnkng said

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Hi again all, (@richjensen, @brndnkng, @SueJ, and anyone else)

I just wanted to share some agenda items I had in mind for this Wednesday’s meeting:

  • Item 1: Make any edits to the live Open Collective About Section (Don’t want to spend too much time here, so I would prefer if these changes could be noted and shared with me at your convenience).

  • Item 2: Discuss & Work to Finalize Donation Tiers (Want to spend most of the time here)

See my initial donation tier suggestions below:

  • Item 3: Work on Communications Plan for fundraising campaign (if we have time this meeting, otherwise we can chat more in the forum).

These are just some ideas I had, but I’m open to hearing and talking through others’ thoughts and concerns as well.

I know I am a bit behind on some of this work myself, compared to initial thoughts and fundraising needs, but my goal is to start promoting this fundraising campaign by Monday of next week (1/31). This will give us a full month to hopefully raise enough funds for Resonate to continue operating for the next few months. With that said, whatever we can do here in the forum and during our meeting to help make that a reality, I am excited to work on!

Thank you all for your time and commitment on this!

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Hi all, (@richjensen, @brndnkng, @SueJ, and anyone else)

Apologies for the late message, but I just wanted to share some agenda items again that I had in mind for this Wednesday’s meeting:

  • Review New Changes to Open Collective Page

    • I rearranged a few of the about sections to try and add more engaging info toward the top, so just wanted to gather people’s thoughts (See HERE and reply with any improvements below.)
  • Talk about activating Open Collective’s Twitter integration and test it

    • Whenever we have a new contributor that has provided a twitter username, a tweet will be automatically sent from our connected account.
  • Review and Finalize Communications Plan: Resonate Renewal Crowdfunding Campaign**

  • Finalize the “pitch” for people to donate to Resonate while we are still building.

    • In some of the threads I’ve seen on Twitter, it sounds like some people may be a bit hesitant to support Resonate based on past experiences or the current omissions that Resonate has, which we are currently working to fix. With this said, I think we need to have a standard answer available for these people who may be a little skeptical about supporting Resonate right now.

    • Here’s my initial thought:

    • Resonate is on a mission to build a fairer music industry for all stakeholders. We’ve come a long way since our founding, but we still have a long way to go to become the platform that we all dream of. With your support today, we will be able to tackle all of the areas of improvement that you have concerns about, and maybe even more. Even if you aren’t ready to support the co-op financially, we would really appreciate it if you could share our campaign with your communities and networks. Thank you.

  • Talk about roles and next steps for outreach

These are just some ideas I had, but I’m open to hearing and talking through others’ thoughts and concerns as well.

Looking forward to chatting more soon and kicking things off for the crowdfunding campaign.

Thank you!

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Some interesting current data from stripe… looks like progress :slight_smile:

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Damn if anyone knows Neil Young and Joni’s adress so we can send them at least a thank you note for helping with the fundraising and user base.

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Or David Crosby?

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@Sam_Martyn I just made a test donation using the Open Collective page. Really easy to use and I got a nice thank you email. Have also tweeted about it. Thank you for all your work to make his happen!

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Apologies for the delayed response, but that’s great to hear!

I saw your donation come in the other day, so thank you for donating!

I appreciate your kind words, and especially your effort here as well.

Let’s get this campaign out there, and hopefully we can do some great work to help Resonate grow!

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