(How you can) Help!

General
#1

@Roboto asked me about fundraising stuff as they are very interested in aligning a number of NB activities with the fundraising mission.

I told them I’d send them on some important documents. then I went looking for the documents. And they are in a few difference places.

You can help now by helping collect, categorize, and placing the documentation in a better way so more people can read and help. This will also help everyone familiarize themselves with the documents.

The Fundraising team has spend a ton of time creating and editing documentation, creating surveys, collecting and analyzing results, doing grant research, and it’s all collected in these documents.

The places are:

  1. Trello, the fundraising board cards, archived and current (best)
  2. slack pinned to fundraising-wg
  3. There’s some on the wiki as well. (worst)

These pages aren’t even linked (i was supposed to do that)
https://www.noisebridge.net/wiki/Fundraising

  • This page was superceded by Trello

The fundraising is burnt the fuck out for many reasons. But anyone who wants to pick it up needs to read to catch up. I’m going to be very frank with you, I’m not answering to anyone if they don’t start helping and get themselves up to speed. They are wasting the money we spent by not using what we have gained.

I’m available to help but i can barely look at it without thinking of the shit I had to wade through the past 6 months, let alone people thinking I have to stand in front of them when they can’t get behind the team. I’m trying to not do the thing were someone with information walks away from Noisebridge just because one noisebridger walked over them. Help me out.

So thank you @Roboto for hearing my frustrations with this and volunteering immediately to help. I am here to help you for certain. The critical documentto read first is the case statement.

It’s on the trello board if you scroll to the right in the “Important Documents and Notes” section. This is probably the best organized place.

The rest there are also good to read.

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#2

I’m a little burnt out too but happy to answer questions and on board people. I ran the on boarding meeting in May.

The main thing that needs to be done right now is that corporations need to be researched so we know how to get money from them. We had a large list of corporations which has been narrowed down to the top six we want to start with. @Roboto if you or anyone else is interested in this task, I will pay for the professional researcher from Scandiuzzi Krebs to do an example corporate profile for us, and we can follow that as we do the rest on our own. More details on this here: Notes from meeting about corporate sponsorship 2019-05-28

Second, if anyone sees any grants they want to apply to, I can also provide a few past grant applications for you to follow, just let me know.

Finally, it would be really nice for us to have a consistent social media presence showing who’s doing what interesting things in the space to get our story our there and help people have a more emotional attachment to Noisebridge instead of just rationally knowing it’s a good thing. Happy to share the Buffer credentials with anyone willing to take this on.

Ruth

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#3

Awesome, I will get to work reading and figuring out how to apply what is available to what I’m passionate about: Teaching and helping people understand Tech/Electro ect. I like building shit but when I see a smile on someone’s face because they have just spent the last 2 hours building a circuit they knew nothing about…its amazing.

SO, to the work: My goals(having not read anything yet) are to figure out how to connect funding with the work I am committing to do every monday (Circuit hacking monday) this will ensure that I stay interested and committed to the task.

I have a few people that have talked with me about the classes and NB not really being diverse “enough” to represent the Mission area, but I’m not concerned with this yet: We will diversify more but… first let’s figure out how to take care of the people who are showing up right now…

Many are already below the average SF median / avg salary ect. and we are serving them, so I will begin with this.
Grants to look for
-Lower income
-Teaching Stem related
-Teaching Job skills
-Teaching Emotional Intelligence(eventually) - Yes through tech, weird I know, but possible.

Thank you for pointing me in the right direction and I will continue.

#4

That’s awesome and exactly where we need to be going.

We had similar thoughts and applied for a grant along those lines, specifically about serving the Mission. The grant application referred to data from a survey we conducted that used 3 different sources for the same questionaire:
The space
The mailing list
Meetup

You can aggregated results here with some demographic breakdown.

The response we got back from the grant when we were not selected is that we didn’t really show that we served the mission. While our demographics were on-par or more diverse than SF as a whole, we were far less diverse than the mission.

This is an example of how the data we have drives what kind of grants we will be competitive for.

You can see the discussion about that application and subsequent information here:

They even noted concerns about using Meetup. Meetup makes sense for Noisebridge, because that’s how we get in touch with the community we have developed. But it doesn’t make sense for fostering the community outside your door.

I’m sure we can get more info, but these lessons will help narrow focus on to what is achievable. Remember that the grant money is not about what we want, but what the grantors want. If they want to give it to job programs, then those programs should yield jobs, and those should be kept as a metric of success. Etc. It’s a hard road, but worthy.

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#5

I am also available to answer any questions, I have been collecting information about companies noisebridge should reach out to for fundraising and donations. @ruthgrace should have a list as well. Demographic data and other metrics are something we need to improve on gathering. As well as have easier ways for potential donors to look up relevant info.

Once I have the internet archive does another backup of the website I am going to go through and reorganize information on the wiki so that it is a more logical structure. I will definitely need help with that for anyone who is interested.

#6

Hey Ryan @pyconaut, can you share your list or consolidate it with mine please? I don’t want to double contact people, and I want to have consistent messaging when we’re making our asks, and I want to be consistent about what we’re asking for and offering.

My list is here; request access if you can’t see it already. Notes from meeting about corporate sponsorship 2019-05-28

Thanks

Ruth

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#7

I’ll share it again, mine is separated by industries and needs a few changes before it can be consolidated with yours.

#8

Something Nicole is already helping me with(can’t remember her username) is reaching out to companies for parts &or items I need to teach my CHM classes. I see this as one way to begin convos with corporate entities, and talk about what we are doing, then move into what we need later. Other companies we can just straight up ask for money(they may have paperwork already in place…)

#9

That’s excellent. We had separated out non-monetary donations as “busniess as usual” aka not part of the Fundraising project mission so people would continue as-is and not be tied to any details of the fundraising goals. We have people who are great at getting things donated, and we recognize that donated objects won’t buy a place, so at the time everyone agreed to let those continue and not impose excess restrictions.

The Fundraising project was for cash/grant based donations related to buying a building. Everything else is basically do-ocratic, and as Ruth and you mentioned, the real goal is relationships. At the end of the day we can all work together as long as we make the effort to do so. We have a couple months to work on this aspect, which is pure team/community building, before thinking about restarting with S|K.

Taking the time to coordinate external communication with target companies maximizes our chances of success with that company by not double contacting them. As long as we have a list of target companies, it shouldn’t be a problem to know whether or not to send a quick message internally before reaching out, so I think this coordination is a great step.

#10

I think asking for donations in goods and donations of cash are sufficiently different (probably different people in charge of it within the company we’re asking) that we won’t step on each other’s toes

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#11

This issue of separating the fundraising from the donations is the exact reason I need to update my list, about 30% of my list is companies that will donate money. 20% will donate materials or money. About 30% will donate materials or tools. And about 20% will donate items to be auctioned off.

#12

@pyconaut Can you post the Google drive Link to your list so people can see even before it’s updated? I’m sure it’s useful even in a less updated state – at least then people can check with you if we’re going to contact a company and want to know if it’s been done already.

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#13

Hi, folks:

I’d like to see if I can help out. I have contributed to corporate and open source community initiatives in the past (see LinkedIn profile). I might be able contribute some information architecture and user experience to help to onboard folks, create campaign plans, calendars and kits, and generally help with organizing and executing programs.

I thought I saw a post with the latest links, but I don’t see it. So that I can look around and see if I might be able to help, can someone please point me to the latest:

  • Any overall (“ratified”) mission statement
  • Trello Board link (Maybe this?)
  • Any doc map
  • Live/delivered docs (e.g.: from the completed items in Fundraising case statement) (This looks like a good one. Is it still the latest (no date…)? Noisebridge Case Statement_Working Copy)
  • Any other high-level, strategic or tracking docs you’re currently using right now.

Finally, if someone is available to meet with me Wed or Thurs (either at NB, virtually is OK as well), to give me a verbal walk-through, I might be able to assess the situation and whether I can help more quickly.

Julee

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Fundraising on boarding documentation -- June 24, 2019
#14

Hi Julie,
Yes, having on boarding documentation is a great idea! I’ll make a reminder for myself to put something together for you. Sorry that it’s not all in one place yet.
Ruth

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#15

@Julee, let me know if you have any questions or concerns here: Fundraising on boarding documentation -- June 24, 2019

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