January was a busy month for the Fundraising team. We developed a fundraising roadmap and have been making progress on several projects.
## Year-end campaign wrap-up
We began by reporting back to and thanking donors who contributed to the year-end campaign https://blog.torproject.org/strength-numbers-final-count. We received $300,000 in matching funds from Mozilla and $20,000 from a donor who matched funds from new contributors.
## Cryptocurrency
We are working to allow donors to support Tor with a wider variety of cryptocurrencies. This is in response to many requests to give coins other than Bitcoin and also many complaints we received about Bitpay, our current cryptocurrency processor. We have been working to set up the infrastructure to make this happen and build a new page that allows donors to notify us of their gift and access the wallet addresses. We will be sure to let you know when the new page is live and promote it on social media.
## Monthly Donors
Another area we spent time on in January was monthly donors. We currently have over 300 people who make automatic payments to Tor and we needed to send each a receipt for their 2018 giving. We also had to communicate with those who give via Paypal about an error in our processing that is now fixed, but resulted in charging them twice for their initial gift. Donors were understanding about the mistake and grateful for the communication and transparency. We receive around $4,500 per month from this group, so it is important that they know how much we appreciate them.
We are also laying the groundwork to expand the monthly donor program. We are working on a program name, special swag, and a page through which we can invite people to join. The existing group self-selected, so we are expecting to see a lot of growth once we begin monthly invitations to select groups of donors.
## Grants
On the grants front, we submitted a final report to the Rose Foundation, two proposals to NLnet--one on ESR migration and another on improving transparency and trust for exit relays. We also wrote a concept note on UX improvements to OTF and submitted funder-requested edits on an OTF proposal for onion services. We met with Alison and OONI to discuss how we can can assist them in finding and applying to new funding sources. Finally, we assisted with content for the Sponsors page on the new website.
Feel free to get in touch at any time with questions or suggestions!
Sarah Stevenson Fundraising Director The Tor Project sstevenson@torproject.org
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