2020

Concept

"Wear a mask, use Tor: resist the surveillance pandemic."

This theme allowed us to discuss the global pandemic, its impact on surveillance and censorship, and how Tor, like wearing a mask, helps protect all of us. It also allowed us to create a special year-end product: a face mask.

YE income

Goal: $200K

	2020	2019	2018
Total in YE	$376,314.96	$304,045	$207,500
Average gift	$65.75	$37.57	$46.56
New donors	2,390	4,757	?
New monthly donors	377	330	?
Total cryptocurrency	$58,296	$35,263	?
Total $1K	19	?	?
New $1K+	8	8	?
Bulk email**	tbd	$81,269	?
Direct email**	$25,657	$11,903	N/A
Postal mail****	$3,222	$9,815	N/A

** To be added

*** Direct Email: Emailed 508 donors who had given in the past but were not subscribed to Tor News or Support Opportunities. (To find recipients > CRM > Find Activity > "Double your donation: Friends of Tor matching all gifts")

**** Postal Mail: In 2019, we sent about 366 postal letters during YE2019. In 2020, we culled the list of dead addresses and changed the way we pulled the list of donors who should receive postal mail in order to catch any email we had on file for these donors. It's our goal to email a donor if they have an email on file and use postal mail as the lowest-priority tactic. As such we, sent fewer postal letters in 2020 (147) and earned less from this avenue. That said, we received far fewer return-to-sender letters.

From 10/13 - 12/31, the "official" dates of YE2020, we received $46,246 through the mail in total. $30,000 of that came from a Major Donor.

The postal appeal was sent 11/23. About 21 of the 147 letters sent resulted in a donation. In total, the postal appeal raised $3,222. About $2,500 of this amount came in January due to mailing delays.

It's unknown how the postal mail figures for 2019 were pulled--does this include the total amount raised through postal mail? Or the total amount raised through individuals that received the postal appeal? We don't know, and it's hard to compare 2020 analysis to 2019 as such.

Calendar year income

	2020	2019	2018
Total in calendar year	$913,110.02	$848,756.91	$463,282.67
Average gift	$44.41	$50.34	$54.54
New donors	11,566	10,404	?
Total cryptocurrency	$233,019	$189,637	?

Engagement

266,776 newsletter subscribers at the beginning of the campaign, 278,969 at the end. Subscription rates actually dropped drastically during the campaign. Influence of about:tor?

Page	Hits
/donate/donate-usetor-en-US	170574
/donate/donate-usetor-mobile-ru-RU	136627
/donate/donate-usetor-mobile-en-US	72464
/donate/donate-usetor-mobile-en-GB	36628
Friends of Tor blog post	35968
/donate/donate-usetor-ru	28041
/donate/donate-usetor-mobile-en-IN	20175
/donate/donate-usetor-de	11744
/donate/donate-usetor-mobile-de-DE	11643
/donate/donate-usetor-mobile-fr-FR	9383
/donate/donate-usetor-mobile-pt-BR	9148
Twitter announcement	7412
Appeal email #1	4141
Google Play link	3368
Blog post announcement	3095
Friends of Tor Mastodon	2961
Friends of Tor Twitter	2493
October newsletter	2276
Friends of Tor email	2126

Swag

To be added

Success to repeat & build on

Friends of Tor match: we didn't have Mozilla's corporate match this year, but we leveraged our existing major donors to create a pool of $100K - worked really well! Next year, we will invoice folks upon commitment.
Start the campaign a bit earlier+1
Proactively looking at what was happening in the world (ie, elections) and didn't plan any big actions on specific days b/c of it
Special gift!
The 'download the wallpaper' campaign was fun / got a lot of traction
We did a great job at the process to come up with the campaign slogan
People loved their Tor masks and swag.
The about:tor takeover was really well received by users (and the wallpapers were too!)
Weekly sync was super helpful and fun. 30 minutes weekly was enough.
I did individual outreach to about 400 donors via email and that brought some SYBNT donors back into the fold+1
Mail outreach only had 2 or three return to senders, good $$ return (need to pull all the numbers)
Tiered email appeals worked well
PrivChat with Snowden! Great to have an event with someone super famous in the last month of the campaign, gave us some buzz. Quality of the event, discussion, and panelists was really great. Gus did an awesome job at the behind-the-scenes and production work.
Streaming events created much more engagement than writing blog posts.
State of the Onion was great to do online.

Stuff that didn't go well

Donate page changes were late and we didn't have a plan b.
When pages were delivered, there were lots of bugs in the code and pages missing, which further delayed the launch. Going forward, we could create a task force and testing plan that is ready to fix bugs.
Some swag production took longer than quoted/expected
donate.tpo.org bugs and issues (not sure how this compares to last year?)+1
.onion issues - people wanted to give over .onion but didn't have any options until late in the campaign w/ btcpay
Google, like usual, tried to block our Tor Browser Android update at what could have been a key fundraising time.

Areas for improvement

Keep the calendar of 'to do list' better organized
Better stats and metrics: what kind of metrics we are looking for?
Tracking clicks week by week instead of just checking the over-all clicks so we can make better assumptions about what is working
Tracking the popularity of gifts as we announce and share them
Daily organic gifts from the website - continue tracking this
UX improvements to donate.tpo.org
Documenting the flows for all different personas, including different browser experiences
QA testing donation flows before the campaign

Areas for improvement if we had more capacity

Quicker turnaround/follow up on donations issues, including refunds, bad addresses for gifts, and return-to-sender mail.
Ability to address issues with donate.torproject.org more quickly+1+1
More direct outreach to donors and potential donors -- more touches, but also more educating and more donor creation
More promotional events throughout the campaign
High quality promotional moments - like contests, drawings, special gifts, etc. (Ideas: more wallpapers, Trezor wallets, soliciting illustrations from the community)
More blog posts
Outreach to people about their company's matching funds
Create partnerships that we can leverage for the campaign - having major donors or companies saying 'they donated and you should donate too';
Build more buzz with the media
A/B testing of UX donate.tpo