👋 DSF Members, we need your help! We’re more than halfway into 2025 and only at about 32% of our fundraising for the year. The situation isn’t dire by any means, we have some reserves, but it’s not particularly rosy either. We want to take the financial sustainability of Django more seriously, we have exciting plans for the future (new hires, more new hires, then feature grants), and we could use extra help to make things happen.
If your time is limited, the single best thing you can do today is to get someone you know to contribute to our fundraising campaign for Django’s 20th birthday. I’m sure there are lots of people in your networks that have used Django for years, or a decade, or two! That have built their careers in this space. And yet might not even be aware that this is all a non-profit operation run by volunteers. Get them to donate $20+ to Django if they can afford it! It only takes about 45 seconds, donating via our website, or via GitHub Sponsors (you can do it yourself too if you’re not already!).
- 👉️️ If you’re wondering what exactly our plans are and where the funding goes, check out our 2024 Annual Impact Report which explains all of that.
- If your time is limited and everyone you know already contributes, take a moment to boost our posts on social media? We’re sharing our campaign on Twitter, on Mastodon, on Bluesky, on LinkedIn.
- And if you know potential donors that have FAANG-level money, definitely put us in touch – we have a whole fundraising team now who would love to hear what might or might not sway people.
If you have leads with organizations who use Django and ought to be sponsoring the project, let us know! Our fundraising team is getting prepared to do more active outreach with a revamped set of corporate benefits and sponsorship prospectus. We need you to share qualified leads with us – specific individuals within companies that you think could make a sponsorship happen. We’re interested in major corporations but also smaller operations where we could have more direct communications with decision makers. We’re interested in names, tell us who to contact, why them in particular, at which conferences they might hang out.
We’re very active with local events this year, and could use your help for that too!
- For Django’s 20th birthday we want to encourage local celebrations, and there’s a whole 20th birthday website for that. Have a look, join or run a local one.
- We’ve been offered to have a community booth at PyCon Greece in late August, we need three representatives, and so far only have one. Free or heavily discounted ticket for anyone who’s up for that.
- Same for PyCon UK in September.
- And PyCon Sweden in October.
We have a whole pre-prepared events kit with banner designs, handouts, stickers, Q&A script – if you’re a DSF Member you can definitely do this! If you know people who aren’t DSF Members but might be a good fit, do put us in touch.
Last but not least, we have two new working groups (volunteer teams with powers delegated from the DSF Board) that are looking ready to start soon and could use more members: Diversity and Inclusion, and Events Support. Consider joining!