As of today, I've donated to 16 different projects (excluding Serva, which was purchased). In terms of response, here are the results:
- Asuite (Matteo Salvi) - I'm (slowly) trying to assist with his project so he basically just said thanks, which was fine.
- Splat (Skwire) - contacted me to say thanks and also asked me if there was any features I'd like to see (also great).
- TinyTask - wrote a long and very warm, personal email. Very unexpected and cool from a team that I thought had abandoned that program.
Suggestions
- Thanks, ask about Feature Requests - as above
- Kudos lists e.g. https://www.gnupg.org/donate/kudos.html (should be optional)
- Mailing list / newsletter (optional). Some sense that progress is ongoing
Related
- Feature Bounties - I saw Pidgin set this up a long time ago, essentially generating a list of possible, new features and letting donations decide what would get the development time.
- Why it is important. If your program is helpful with security, you can cast your program against recent security news to demonstrate its importance (the GPG site above had a great page for this in the recent past but it's since been taken down).
- Check out other fundraising efforts for ideas. For example: http://reactos.com/reactos-fundraiser-2012 and https://www.kickstarter.com/discover/ca ... f=category