Amy Parker has been a fundraising professional for the past 20 years. Before the OpenSSL Foundation, where she is working now, she has worked for the Wikimedia Foundation and others. She shared with me her insights on how traditional non-profit fundraising skills can be applied to open source software funding. Hi, I'm Amy Parker. I am the Chief Funding Officer at the OpenSSL Software Foundation, which is a role I've held only since October. It's a new adventure for me.
The mission is we believe everyone should have access to security and privacy tools, whoever they are, wherever they are, whatever their personal beliefs, as a fundamental human right. When I was hired, there were three other people at the foundation who all have been with the project for a really long time and are software engineers. I was hired to develop the fundraising program so that we can become more sustainable and have long-term sustainability for the project and our finances.
Because we're such a small place, I actually do a lot of things. That's probably not a surprise. I sit on the management team. I'm helping with some planning around the first ever OpenSSL conference, which will take place in Prague next year in October. Coming to things like FOSDEM and ICMC, trying to get to know the community more and learn how people are using us and improve our messaging and the whole gamut of things that do not involve technical experience.
I have been working as a nonprofit fundraising professional for more than 20 years. It really started in college, frankly. There's a long version of the story, but the short version of the story is that I was doing some volunteering in college with the fundraising office for my university. It was a really interesting discovery to me. Who knew this was a job? It was just really fascinating. I ended up getting into this career.
My first job was at a university, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Universities are really amazing places to start a fundraising career because they've been doing fundraising for a long time. They're well-resourced. They have a lot of systems and infrastructure and support, so it's kind of like you get the textbook experience of it from that. I enjoyed it very much, but I didn't attend that university. I didn't pull on my heartstrings.
Once I felt that I had enough professional knowledge to seek jobs elsewhere, I moved to the New York Public Library, and then to the Smithsonian Institution, and then to the Wikimedia Foundation. The through line with all of that was really about education, and particularly education resources that are free and accessible to anyone without discrimination. That was really what drove me to Wikimedia in the beginning. Then when I got there, I discovered this whole free and open source world.
I really felt at home because of the values. Working in philanthropy, you have these very charitable, we're in it together, we can make the world a better place, optimistic, democratic, all those values that I saw absolutely mirrored in the free and open source software side. Wikimedia was sort of the bridge for me. It is an open source project, but because most users don't think about the technology, they just receive the information, I didn't focus a lot on that aspect.
I focused more on the everyday user experience and the donors who funded it for those reasons. I'd been there for four years, and I was looking for a new challenge when I saw this job on LinkedIn. Shout out, second time in my life I found a job on LinkedIn. It just intrigued me. I knew it was going to be much harder than my other jobs, lacking the global brand awareness, but it's an interesting moment at the foundation. There was a reorganization that led to the creation of my job.
My position had not existed there before, so it was going to be a great challenge and a great learning opportunity for me. When you're starting really low, everything you contribute is a big step forward, so I really find that satisfying. Our foundation was established as a non-profit organization in the U.S., but did not pursue 501c3 status, which is that U.S. federal designation of you as a charity on the national level.
We're in a little bit of an interesting space trying to figure out how we're going to pursue funding because without that status, we can't easily go to the big U.S. foundations that might be well-suited for us in other circumstances. We're really focusing right now on corporate sponsorship. OpenSSL is part of infrastructure. Everybody uses it. It's in everything. Regular people on the street might never have heard of it, but everybody is benefiting from this.
Our first approach is really to talk to the companies that understand how valuable it is and understand how core it is to getting their application software, whatnot, to work and to work securely.
The 501c3 status is the U.S. Internal Revenue Service has an application process you have to go through to prove that you have a charitable cause and that you are structured in a way that is transparent and that is going to use the money received not for the profit of the people employed, but for a mission that you're serving. It also comes with tax benefits. If I make a gift to a 501c3 charity, it may be tax deductible for me, which means that I get some return on making that gift.
For most people, I think the studies show in the U.S., it's like fewer than 50% of people care about that tax benefit, but the real value of the 501c3 is that it's an indicator of a status. It is not easy to get, and once you get it, it's actually not easy to maintain it. People understand, at least in the U.S., they understand if you have this status, it means something. It's conferred sort of a designation on you.
You have to report a great deal of information in your annual taxes that is then available to the public, whether you like it or not. There's a huge amount of work that goes into it. Not every organization would have the resources to stand up their own 501c3, but it does come with a great value. As I said, we are charitable in the sense that that is our intention for existing, but we don't have 501c3 status, so it can be done without it. We are pursuing the avenues that we can without it.
Certainly having a formal organization makes a lot of things easier. Even just receiving a donation, if you are just a person without an organization around you, that's going to be challenging. There are financial regulations and taxes and laws that just make all of this challenging no matter how much we care and simply want to make a gift.
Within all nonprofits, but including within the FOSS community, there are fiscal sponsorship arrangements and other ways that you can get the benefit of a 501c3 status without creating your own entity. If this is a thing an organization wants to explore, there actually are some great studies and research papers and a lot written out there, a lot of resources to go to to find ways to help you navigate this, depending on how big your organization is and what your aspirations are.
There are a number of types of fiscal sponsorship arrangements with different degrees of comprehensiveness. In the most comprehensive version of fiscal sponsorship, you essentially don't have to have an organization. The fiscal sponsor takes you on as one of their projects. Imagine a blank slate of a charity and they, instead of developing their own programs, they identify projects in the world that all align with their vision and mission and they sort of adopt them in.
That fiscal sponsor might do, at minimum, they might just help with processing gifts and giving that charitable status to the gift so the donor can get a tax receipt. But at maximum, they might do everything for you. They might manage your finances. You might run your payroll through them.
It could be a real sort of home for the organization in all legal, financial, administrative ways, which is ideal for many projects for which the only people involved are the people doing the work of the project itself. They do not want nor have the time or capacity to take on all of those administrative burdens. Prices can vary, but it's usually a percentage of the money that you bring in. You have to make your own calculations for yourself, but generally speaking, they are worth it.
These fiscal sponsors are themselves charities. They are not profit-making ventures, so they are charging reasonable rates that are a fair and accurate representation of the value you get in return. I believe they are. I've thought a lot about the similarities and differences between other types of non-profits and these false non-profits, whether or not they're officially non-profits.
I think a really sad truth is that at both types of organizations, everybody really wants someone else to be paying for it. At the New York Public Library, so many people would be like, don't my state tax dollars pay for this? At the Smithsonian, oh, I pay taxes for that. At Wikimedia, everybody's like, aren't the big tech companies paying you?
This reality that we live in, where everybody kind of takes for granted all of the work that goes into these wonderful free resources, it's true for all of the FOS communities, not alone. There are some advantages, though, in the FOS side in terms of the actual engagement of real people. The Smithsonian's a wonderful place, but if you want to get involved, it's not easy to get involved.
There are some crowd-sourced projects and some things you could do, but that's not really set up to engage a grand group of people, whereas at our organizations, we're begging for people to come and help in small ways, big ways, every single way possible. People like to be deeply engaged. People generally don't just want to give you a check and never think about you again. They want it to be something they care about.
We have that advantage of people that really care and are deeply engaged with us. There's a good connection there between engagement and ultimately in fundraising. I have spoken to many software engineers that feel hemmed in by, you must complete X specific thing by X date, because for practical reasons.
They don't know when they start working on it, where that journey is going to go, is it really possible to be done by that date, but a lot of funding is contingent upon you being able to say, this is what we're going to achieve. Not just, we're going to make a widget, but who is going to benefit from that widget? Why does the world need that widget? What is the impact of that going to be on either a small segment of users or a larger society?
That storytelling around the impact is really the most essential component to all fundraising. Corporations, foundations, people, stories are what make us human. If you can't do that, you're just standing around saying, we need money to build this tool, end of sentence. It's really not inspiring anyone. I personally really come back to the fact that we're all people in the end.
Whether you are in the corporate marketing office of a big tech company talking to me about sponsorship money or sitting as a program officer in a foundation, if you and I are talking and we're not connecting and you're not feeling interested in this, my strategy does not matter. That sort of human relationship and networking, I think, is step one.
Then it's a bit of differentiation because companies, many of them have values and good things they want from the world, but they ultimately need to make money. That's why they exist. Their motivations are obviously different.
Whether they are in a charitable foundation or than me giving money to one of the nonprofits I saw in the hall at FOSDEM, there are different motivations, but at the end of the day, I think you have to go back to that sort of core, connecting with people, getting them interested in the story. The largest and most robust fundraising programs will have a broad mix of revenue streams.
They will raise money from individuals, small-dollar donors, big-dollar donors, foundations, corporations, corporate sponsorship, gifts and wills, gifts of stock and in-kind support. They will have earned revenue through branded merchandise, possibly support contracts. The most sophisticated places will really have a wide number of revenue sources and a diverse mix. That's really the ultimate dream to aspire to because every one of those is an unpredictable revenue stream.
If you are only getting really large gifts and one year that gift doesn't come through, it can be devastating. Having a mixture to help you weather the tides of change is really the ideal, but it's not practical for everybody to actively pursue all channels at once. I think for a lot of organizations, really, I think everybody should make it possible for individuals to donate. You have a community of people. Many of them would be happy to give you some small support.
Making it possible is different than designing an intensive fundraising program around. Early in a fundraising program, you want to open the gates and have a net to catch the things that are going to come to you from many diverse sources, but the best return on investment you will get is focusing on larger gifts.
Whether those can be foundations, corporations, or individuals depends a little bit on taxes and all those things, but the larger gifts are really the most—they take a lot of work and investment, but the return is so great that they are worth it versus sending an email that you're going to have to have a list of millions to get the same return asking people for $5 at a time.
Do you have a recommendation for people who write public interest software, open source software, and who struggle to make it sustainable financially? Yeah. I think the first thing to do is really ask yourself why it's struggling financially, and people in this community are quite passionate about their causes, so this can be a hard question to ask without the emotion of it and to really step back and say, is this struggling because actually technology is moving in a different direction?
This is just not something that's needed as much anymore, or is it really something more sort of mundane like because we've never tried to raise money for it? What are those reasons? To be honest with yourself about it and then to try not to have too much ego as you think about solutions.
In a fiscal sponsorship model, you kind of lose a little bit of your brand identity by being under someone, and that might not be attractive in some ways, but if the mission gets fulfilled better that way, it might be the right thing to do. I believe across all nonprofits, there are frankly too many nonprofits doing very similar things. In many cases, if people partnered up and merged and worked together, the world would have more overall impact.
I think it really is some hard discussions that need to be had, and ultimately, at the end of the day, you might decide that your organization needs to go in a different kind of direction, but it also could just be that you need to take a moment where you ramp it up and invest more, say, we have to invest more in this and build the resources, hire somebody to help with the fundraising or whatever that might be to try to take yourself to the next level.
It's a bit of a crazy time in the world right now, so I would hope that we can all think about how to make the world a better place. I'm going to give you three versions of an answer. The first one is, be a good listener. We often don't really actively listen to one another, and especially when we don't agree, and I really think the world would be a much better place if we all could practice the skill of active listening and be empathetic.
On a second level, I think that something we can all do is take a minute to just think about what do you care about and make a list of a few organizations, two or ten, that are working on that. Put a calendar reminder on once a year. Make a gift to those places. You will feel so good that day looking up your ten places and making your gifts. It's like a celebration. It's one of my favorite things.
I always do it in December, and just the act of thinking about your values and who's helping advance that in the world, it really, I think, does. It feels good for you, and it does make the world better. And then, you know, I really love cats. Adopt a cat from a shelter or a dog. Those would be my three things. All right. Anything else you would like to add to wrap up the interview? No, I just really appreciate this opportunity.
As I said, my venture here has not been the traditional pathway, but it has been wonderful to feel so welcomed and people so eager to help me learn more and understand cryptography as a non-tech person and all those great things. So thanks for the chat. All right. Thank you very much, Amy.