Everyone Should Copy Thunderbird

Thunderbird got some really good improvements over the past couple of years; A full on redesign and I presume a refactor of some parts of the codebase have really brought thunderbird back to my attention and I've found myself actually using it, especially after I switched away from Proton Mail.

But really the thing that I've really not been praising enough is Thunderbird's new approach to donation campaigns.

Traditionally with FOSS software like this, the donation campaigns happen through social media, project blogs or mailing lists. That's nice and all but it has the major flaw that it only works for a specific group of people.

Specifically it works on those that are all, at the same time:

• Users of the software
• Users of (the same) social media (as the software)
• Followers of the Project

That is not really optimal; It's only a subset of those that use the software

So the change was quite simple: Ask users directly in the software, once a year in december.

And well hey, who would've guessed, it worked wonders.

The second they implemented this change, as visible in their 2022 Financial Report their user donations more than doubled; Going from ~2.5 Million EUR to ~6.4 Million EUR. And across all sources of income Thunderbird has, user donations are by far the most prominent, making up (as per their own words) 99,9% of all income to the project.

Ever since then, I've urged projects to adopt a similar strategy, especially those that were struggling. Sometimes someone else was much faster (or I was too lazy) but nonetheless these discussions exist out there for various projects, like elementary for example.

Then, not too long ago KDE e.V which make the Plasma Desktop, Krita and lots of other Open-Source projects adopted a similar strategy in Plasma; They would send a single notification with a short text and a donate button to every user in December of every year, with a toggle to disable these notices entirely.

And guess what? Completely unexpectedly /s donations to KDE e.V went up as well! Even looking at just their PayPal donations, it was several thousand EUR higher than it had been the past few years

The point I am trying to make here is simple: If you're an open source project, please just copy Thunderbird and KDE's homework.

It has proven itself to work wonderfully across several projects now and really has no downsides that I can think of

Looking at you, https://elementary.io or https://matrix.org, go through with it, you won't regret it I swear!

I don't have it easy with finding jobs and life in general, any little bit helps <3 https://liberapay.com/cyrneko https://ko-fi.com/cyrneko