Yesterday I posted information on the Mozilla Foundation’s grants and related expenditures in 2007 to date, and concluded by briefly mentioning our intention to fund projects in more areas as we move into 2008. In connection with that, today we’re announcing what I call a “directed giving” program for the Mozilla Foundation that allows you to donate to the Foundation and designate your donation for any one of a set of Mozilla-related projects.
It works as follows: When you donate to the Mozilla Foundation, you now have the option of directing your donations to one of four selected projects (Bugzilla, SeaMonkey, Camino, and Mozilla accessibility for people with disabilities). (You can also choose to make a traditional unrestricted donation as well.) We’ll take note of your choice, and keep track of how much money has been designated for each project. We’ll then work with the people responsible for each project and come up with some worthy project-related initiatives for the Mozilla Foundation to fund using those designated donations.
(If for some reason we can’t identify suitable activities to fund for a project, if a project becomes inactive, or if it otherwise becomes ineligible to receive funds, then we’ll use the funds for other worthwhile Mozilla-related activities.)
As an extra incentive to help get the program started, the Mozilla Foundation will match 2-for-1 any donations you designate for these projects from now until the end of 2007, up to a maximum of $10,000 per project. For example, if you and others designate a total of $3,000 in donations for the Bugzilla project through December 31, 2007, the Foundation will add $6,000 to that, for a total of $9,000 designated for Bugzilla-related projects. If you and others designate $5,000 or more for Bugzilla during that time, we’ll add the maximum matching amount of $10,000 to whatever is designated for Bugzilla.
As noted in the Mozilla Foundation donations FAQ, we’re encouraging people to donate because we want to give people more ways to be involved in and engaged with the Mozilla project, and we want to give the various individual projects within the overall Mozilla project the chance to promote themselves and further grow their communities of supporters. We chose these particular four projects because they each had a long history of activity, an already active community of developers and users, and a number of possible initiatives that didn’t overlap with existing plans for Firefox and Thunderbird. We’re willing to consider additional projects in the future for which you could designate donations; please feel free to send us your suggestions. (However note that we plan to keep the number of possible designation choices relatively small, in order to maintain focus and keep the internal accounting simple.)
If you have any further questions about the directed giving program, please feel free to send us an email at donations (at) mozilla.org. If you’ve donated to the Mozilla Foundation before, we thank you for your past donation and encourage you to consider making a new donation designated for one of these projects. If you haven’t donated yet, please consider supporting one of these worthy initiatives.
P.S. Thanks go to David Boswell for his work in getting this program set up and launched.