Why is this GNOME fundraiser suggesting you donate less? Because steady beats flashy—and sometimes less means more.
The Gnome Foundation folks are having a big fundraiser right now in which they’re asking you to donate less. If that woke you up a bit, it did me too. As you might imagine, that’s kind of a trick thing to get your attention, but it’s a trick thing with a point.
The foundation is the organization behind the desktop environment with the same name, which just happens to be by most accounts the most used DE in Linuxland.
As you might know, Gnome’s been in troubled financial waters for a while now. The difficulty actually started because Gnome had been so good at raising funds and not immediately spending the money, but keeping it on hand to pay the bills. Unfortunately, this encouraged complacency and led to relaxed fundraising efforts. In other words, they glided for a number of years, living on money that wasn’t actually coming in because they had enough in the bank to cover expenses.
Until they didn’t.
A while back, when the money was starting to run low but before it was completely gone, they decided they needed to get serious about building some new money streams, which happened about the same time that Neil McGovern was stepping down as executive director. When Holly Million was hired to replace him in 2023, job one was to get to work raising some cash to keep the bills paid so Gnome development could continue. For one reason or another, that didn’t work out and nine months later she quit.
By this time, finances were getting rather dire and the organization began cutting projects and letting some people go.
The good news is that under the new leadership of Richard Littauer, who took over the reins as interim director when Million departed, and Steven Deobald who was eventually hired as her replacement, some additional funding was found and Gnome isn’t taking on water anymore, or at least not nearly as bad as it had been.
But better isn’t quite good enough, so Deobald is turning to Gnome’s users—which might include folks who use other DEs too, since there’s a whole boatload of desktops based on Gnome—and imploring them to “donate less.”
“We have a new donation page. But before you go there, I would like to impress upon you this idea,” he wrote in a blog on the Gnome website. “We would vastly prefer you donate $10/mo for one year ($120 total) than $200 in one lump sum.”
It’s kind of a new take on the old axiom that one in the hand bests two in the bush. The advantage, as Deobald explains it, is twofold. To begin with, donating on the installment plan creates a dependable cash flow which is better for the organization in the long run than lump sum payments.
“A non-profit built on chasing grants and begging for large checks is inherently fragile. Financial planning that is based on big, irregular revenue sources is bound to fail sooner or later. Conversely, financial planning based on monthly recurring revenue trends close to reality. The organization is more stable as a result.”
The other advantage is psychological. A patron donating through small monthly payments is likely to donate more in the long run than one who periodically makes a large one-off donation, which is why listener supported radio stations push for monthly pledges during fund drives.
“Maybe you decide $10/mo is such a small number (the price of two coffees in any country where I’ve lived over the past 15 years) that you’re happy to keep on donating at the end of one year?” he wrote. “Great! If not? No hard feelings. The consistency still made the $120 figure extremely valuable to us.”
Ready to give? There’s a Gnome fundraiser payment page to make the process painless.
Christine Hall has been a journalist since 1971. In 2001, she began writing a weekly consumer computer column and started covering Linux and FOSS in 2002 after making the switch to GNU/Linux. Follow her on Twitter: @BrideOfLinux
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