Calendar Project donations update

One month ago, I reported that the Calendar Project is now finally able to accept donations through the community giving program of the Mozilla Foundation. So I guess it’s time to reveal how we have done so far.

I currently have only received the numbers for the last two weeks of March (we started accepting donations on March 16 2009) and those numbers look quite promising. In the first five days after the initial announcement people donated $698.05 to Calendar using PayPal. For the remaining 10 days of March we took in another $437.05 bringing us to a total of $1135.10 for March through PayPal*.

We will now discuss internally on how to allocate this money in the most effective and efficient manner for the project. We will also be thinking hard about further fund raising possibilities.

Let me use this opportunity to thank everybody who has donated to the Calendar Project so far and to everyone who is planning on doing this in the future. I would also be interested in any ideas that you (our community) might have on how to raise our fund-raising capabilities.

* Please note that the total donation number should be higher than that since this doesn’t include any donations this month (April) or any check donations.

17 comments

  1. Congratulations!
    I must say, that is very impressive. I honestly didn’t think that it would receive even half of that amount in donations. I didn’t think that it was really ‘advertised’ enough to get the message out to enough people to bring in the donations. So image how well it will do with donations with some better fund raising ideas.
    Some ideas:
    – The project’s very own .com address, something like spreadlightning.com similar to spreadfirefox.com and so on.
    – Possible a news article (maybe on slashdot or elsewhere) explaining the potential for the Calendar project, but also that it’s seeking more developers and of course the possibility of donating.
    Best of luck with everything. Calendar project will always be a success. I’m crossing my fingers still that Sunbird will survive as well.
    Dave

  2. When I saw I could donate to you last week, I didn’t hesitate.
    Since I rely on the Lightning/Calendar combo to work, I thought it was the least I could do, not just being a beta tester.
    I hope it’ll help!
    I agree we Dave though, you could use more advertising. Even if people only give a couple of dollars, there are lots of people using Calendar, so it’ll be very helpful.
    Keep up the good work!
    Emmanuel

  3. Happy to see that users are willing to put their money where their mouth is ;)
    I agree with Dave that a calendar-focused website/community forum would help promote Lightning/Sunbird and raise donations.

  4. Set up a twitter account for lightning / sunbird….and get users to follow it.
    I don’t remember seeing html for link badges to post on sites either. I would certainly post a link from my site!

  5. Calendar Team,
    I’d love to switch to thunderbird with lightning, however, i can not do it until outlook’s “custom view” culture is brought in.
    I have to have a set of user-defined views for tasks, appointments and journal.
    Existing custom views functionality allows you to filter(nothing else) mail only.
    Not possible to group, sort within group, filter, autoformat text and so on within one tasks, appointments or journal view as you’d normally have it in Outlook.
    When will this functionality be available?
    Also, when will notes and journal surface?
    I’m happy to donate, but i need to know that it’s going the right way and the approximate timeline of getting there.
    Thank you

  6. Use the money to keep Sunbird releases going!

  7. I think we could generalize the concept of the 1$ app of Apple iStore – why shouldn’t we ask for 1$ donation for each major version download? At least have a row of equally highlighted button: so;ething like ‘download for free’, ‘give 1$ and download’, ‘give 2$ and download’ and ‘give 5$ and download’.
    I, for sure, will regularly give *at the same time I download* – which is the right time because it is where I feel I should pay for the work done. Asking contribution separately is clearly harder for different reason: spreading the information of the donation campaign, the user feel less responsible when he is using the app since weeks… for free, and simply because people forget!
    If we ask them at the time of download, I’m sure we could generate a much more steady stream of financing by donation… and of course, we will still have the ‘download for free’.
    Of course there is the problem of automatic download and such, but we could first try to do that on the website and see how it goes…
    Seems too simple and surely somebody must have thought of that before, then, tell me why it is not yet done? :-)

  8. Sorry to bother here , but don`t know where else….
    Downlaodaded Thunderbird 3 b2 and lighting and run it did not work ok , but also deisntaleed the original calenar lightning 0.9 and I cant get it back….
    what can I do? Back to Outlook (pls Noooooo)
    Tks
    cd

  9. I think Franck’s idea is a good one…

  10. For me the main reason I have only installed “lightning” is the fact that I cant syncronise it with my Sony Ericsson phone. If that was made possible I would finnaly be able to stop using microsoft programs..

  11. Anything new ? Bugs solved? Any information on this weblog?

  12. … and provide a Euro zone bank account so that we don’t have to donate money to Paypal …

  13. It has been closed to a month since the last updates. any new information on a release?

  14. I suggest to get money for this project of integration of ligthing , it is to use the Firefox way. On the installation of Thunderbird, to propose automatically a mail account (for example Gmail, Yahoo, …) and get money for this. In my point of view that could be very interested for Google or another

  15. No info on this blog – is the calendar project still alive?
    roadmap?