Version 4.6, the latest release of CiviCRM, has been out for just over a month now and for the first time we tied in a fairly concerted effort to encourage contributions during download. With the goal of reaching $5,000 in support, this campaign represented another initiative aimed at bringing CiviCRM as a project to a sustainable point. Given that this had not been attempted before, it was a bit of a test to see how the CiviCRM community would respond. So, how’d we do?
As of Friday, May 8th, we raised exactly $6,200 from 83 unique contributors (combined organizations and individuals) for an average of $74.70 per gift! That’s 24% above our goal and is more than CiviCRM has raised during all downloads… ever. A big thanks to everyone that contributed to make the 4.6 drive a success! We’re truly happy with the response and are thankful for your support. All contributions will be applied to our efforts to make CiviCRM sustainable.
What’s next for future ‘download drives’?
As good as these numbers are, we do have room for improvement. Looking at the total number of downloads of 4.6, we can see that about 2.5% of those that downloaded went on to contribute as well. The figure gets a little better, however, if we compare the number of those that contributed for 4.6 against the number of installs, resulting in just under 8% as having contributed. Not too shabby, but again, we have room to grow community support.
In general, we are seeing a slow increase in support including more member sign ups. With the addition of new member benefits and features like CiviConnect, we believe that even more end user organizations will kick in to help make CiviCRM sustainable. Likewise, drives similar to this last one indicate to us that, as we improve our messaging and consistently demonstrate the value of CiviCRM to our community, we’ll see an overall increased level of giving. All very positive signs, but they’re a long term approach to sustaining the project.
The Core Team is committed to 2 major releases a year, bringing new features and improvements to an already powerful CRM. And, with each major release, we’ll ask for support from the CiviCRM community during a “download drive”... a 30 day window of effort to garner support for the latest release and to help push the project to sustainability.
Again, a big thanks to everyone that contributed to make the 4.6 drive a success! Now on to 4.7…
Josh
Comments
Congrats on a success in this short campaign Josh. If you're getting 8 percent of installs to donate that sèms like a very high rate, especially as some will be giving in other ways and thus won't have ponied up.