Raise 5000€ for audit costs

The co-op needs to raise 5000€ to pay audit costs.

[info needed]

The post above is set as a “wiki” so anyone can edit to add more info/context. @brndnkng @directors @Nick_M

Then we can sync with @Sam_Martyn and @simonfreund to start getting out the message and directing folks to Open Collective.

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Per my comment in November, I suggest this figure be raised to 50,000€.

Approximates:

5000 for three audits 2019 - 21
2000 for 2020 Taxes
1500 for VAT Registration
1500 for Account Maintenance (Bookkeeping oversight)
25000 Contingency (Potential Director Liability)
15000 Exec/Admin/DSP Funding

Thanks for sharing, Rich.

Are these costs ordered by priority? And if not, how would you order them?

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I’m wondering what steps have been taken on this, since your initial post, to make it happen?

I’m also wondering if there’s any harm in starting with 5k, calling that a success and then scaling up? It seems more manageable and do-able. But I can also see it being maybe something that shoots us in the foot long term where we’re like "but we already raised x money, why weren’t you up front?

I’m curious on people with fundraising experience to weigh in on this, particularly @zetto.plus @ode12, and @simonfreund ?

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If we are aim for such a high goal, it would be beneficial to do a retrospective on our last fundraising effort before planning our next one. Last time we shot for 20,000 and earned about 7,000? If we reflect on how things went last time, we’ll be a better situation for the next one.

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I’m not sure about how much money makes sense as a goal, but I can confidently suggest that any financial goal is sorely ambitious without a fundraising structure and culture (and also procedure where folks can plug in and assist mechanically). I think success with fundraising depends on how folks can anticipate what is achievable in a specific time frame.

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Some notes on our last crowdfunding campaign effort, and thoughts from me:

This previous crowdfunding campaign ran over the course of about 5 months, with most of the donations coming in months 1-2 and most of the memberships coming in months 2-3, from what I could remember.

Good Things:

  • We raised about 10,000€!
  • We were able to generate future revenue through monthly donations and new memberships.
  • We were able to generate some support via social media, email communication, and the forum.
  • We were able to receive some support from Open Collective & Ampled to promote our campaign and work to build our relationship.

Room for Improvement:

  • Only achieved 50% of our 20,000€ goal, and technically it was only 25% because we only raised 5,000€ from Open Collective.
  • There were no perks offered upon donation, so we really didn’t run a crowdfunding campaign, it was more like just a donation drive.
  • In my opinion, for what should be a co-op wide effort due to the financial situation of the co-op at the time, only a few people really contributed to the project which didn’t allow for as much interaction and communication of the campaign than what was needed.
  • We weren’t able to tap into any of our higher profile connections/network (that I am was aware of) to promote the campaign and drive donations.
  • Despite the listed goals, I believe we were only able to accomplish about 25% (2/8) of our deliverables with the donation money collected, and what we did with this money was not well communicated after the fact since fundraising kind of just fizzled out after a handful of months.

There are probably more good things and room for improvement things I can add beside what I just listed off the top of my head, but overall, this leads me to my opinion points on this potential future campaign:

  • Based on the timing and results of our last campaign, unless we get a high profile person(s) to donate directly, Resonate will not raise 50,000€ over the next few months.
  • 5,000€ could be possible, but I honestly feel a bit shy asking for these donations since we didn’t seem to accomplish much as a result of our last campaign. Perhaps I just didn’t follow well enough where this money went, but that’s also another roadblock - capacity for transparency and consistent communication before, during, and after the campaign.
  • In my research, I’ve found that there are literally hundreds of thousands of people who could be interested in what Resonate is doing and who would potentially donate to the work we’re doing, given the right incentives and information.
  • I believe we could have a much better campaign the second time around if we offered perks with donations (i.e. “free” listening credits, forum badges, artist merch, etc.) and/or if we engaged more of our network (BSA, Zack Fox, Cake, etc.) to help us promote the campaign and support Resonate.
  • I currently don’t have the time to do all the planning and communication work needed for this, but am more than happy to pass all of my previous research and info along to @simonfreund and/or any others who may be interested in championing this effort, while I help out where I can as well.
  • Looking back now, the roadmap that was listed for the previous campaign seems to be extremely ambitious and financially underestimated to me now, so having a more succinct game plan, and making sure we have the capacity to implement this roadmap step by step in the coming months will be paramount to a future campaign, especially if we hope to get higher profile supporters (promoters and/or donors) involved.
  • Our Twitter account (Resonate’s most followed social platform) looks like it’s been losing followers on a consistent basis month over month. I don’t have the data to fully prove this, but to me, it seems like Resonate’s overall momentum has been declining in recent months. With that said, I think we need to showcase a few “wins” (new features, accomplishments, new volunteers/team members, etc.) to build a bit more momentum behind Resonate before going out and asking for more donations. I believe there have already been some exciting things in the works behind the scenes, so if we can start sharing more of these things to a broader network of people, I think we can be in a better place a few months from now where it would make more sense to start a fundraising campaign at the beginning of say, April 2023. If Resonate has the resource capacity (capital, people, etc.) to wait until then, I am not sure.

I really believe in the mission of Resonate, and I think we can do some amazing things, but I also don’t want us to repeat the same mistakes, so hopefully this is a good retrospective that we can continue discussing to build something even better moving forward.

Thanks,
– Sam Martyn

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Brilliant retrospective @Sam_Martyn :bowing_man:

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Thank you, @Sam_Martyn – this is really helpful and a great starting point for planning a new crowdfunding campaign. However, I would like to concentrate on what’s closest to us for now, which is the AGM, by trying to get as many people to participate as possible. This will be a good chance to address that the coop is in need of money and to figure out how much money that actually is and what it will be used for.

Also, I believe that raising 50k simply to keep the accounting running is way too little. If we raise money, we need to raise as much as to keep the whole coop running, meaning paying for the onboarding of new artist, developing the player (apps) and basically everything that is needed to start making money. This might sound too ambitious, but there’s really no point in fixing holes when the pipe is not connected – if you know what I mean.

So, YES – let’s raise money, but let’s aim for what we actually need (this is what we have to figure out first) and then come up with a plan how this is possible.

I’m here to help with that, I simply believe this should happen after the AGM, when everyone is on the same page again for the next year.

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Are there any grants or other kind of support we can apply for, something like this?

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I don’t know, but this is a great start already :fire:

Are you interested in taking this further by finding out how to apply or by writing an application or anything else?

I still believe we have to find out how much funding we actually need first, but it’s good to have some potential funding aligned already and to gather possibilities.

Thank you very much for bringing this up : )

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I’m terrible at writing formal stuff, but I can look around and see what an application should contain, and whether we fulfill their criteria :slight_smile:

EU:

  • Probably the best place to start is this funding guide/questionnaire.

  • This document shows some of the distributed/endorsed(?) grants by Music Moves Europe. I think we’re in the ballpark of AVAERA on page 4, but our project is more better in many ways, in my opinion.

  • This document shows many other accepted/endorsed(?) grants. A shortlist:
    – European Composer and Songwriter Alliance, page 46. They work for fairer social and economic conditions for artists, which is also one of our goals. They seem pretty big, with likeminded partners in other continents. Maybe we should have a chat with them, let them know we exist?
    – European Music Incubator, page 76. They guide artists to sustainable business models. Small artists are paid more per play on Resonate than other platforms, and our coop nature is inherently more sustainable. Maybe we should have a chat with them, let them know we exist?
    – European Music Market Accelerator, page 80. Like EMI, but for bigger artists it seems.

  • European commission about democracy and art. Resonate is democratic.

  • European commission about art economy that works for the people. Our economic model is fair to people, in my impression.

  • Horizon Europe work programme for art 2021-22 has interesting things:
    – Media for democracy – democratic media, page 30. They want a media sector that’s more participatory, transparent and conducive to democracy.

  • This project might be interested in having a talk with us. They’re specifically investigating the effect of large music platforms on fairness in the music industry.

  • This publication shows some of the European Commissions thoughts on music distribution. They mention that transparency to listeners, artists and other stakeholders, and open innovation should be rewarded. We definitely tick those boxes.


There’s also futo in the US, which supports a few big existing FOSS projects with grants and incubatoring(?). Their ideal applicant profile seems to be projects that inhibit large corporate control of social media, messaging, repairs and computing in general. I’ve got a feeling we might fit that profile. The deadline for Spring 2023 grant applications are Jan 1st, however.

With this, we have some guideposts for funding applications :wink:

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Wow – Thank you, @relish : )

That’s an amazing list. I’m currently trying to find out where we keep “lists” at Resonate, so we can add this or create a new one.

Opportunities like the ones you mentioned often come back in cycles, so it’s good to archive even those we will most likely miss this or next year, such as futo.

I feel in this forum, things can get lost quite quickly after they’ve been mentioned once, so I would like to set up (or see if it already exists) a place for information like this.

Maybe you know more or have an idea how to “store” this information, so we can use and update it in the future?

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I think the way around this on the forum is to create a post that’s specifically about finding and applying to grants, and turning it into a wiki.

We’ve actually got a private category called Grants which has nothing in it. I think we could make it public and start a wiki post in it? We’ve also got the Handbook category which to me it makes sense to have a wiki page in there for grant applications. That would make it easy to find.

I use the search feature a lot on the forum and that helps. If we use some of the more static categories to gather information I think that’ll help too.

I’m wary of introducing Yet Another Platform because people are already experiencing platform fatigue (there’s a lot of complaints around mattermost for example).

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I don’t know how other people use the forum, but what grabs my attention isn’t the three non-iconed categories in the header, it’s the three latest/pinned posts and the upper 2/3 of the sidebar categories with icons. I had never clicked the handbook till now, actually :melting_face: .

I think this makes it easier to find than only putting it in the Handbook. Maybe we could have a post in Handbook redirect to the wiki post in Grants category? Or the other way around? Double visibility is doubly visible, after all.

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