In January of this year, the DSF ran a fundraising campaign with the intention of funding the DSF Fellowship. This fundraising drive enabled us to fund the Fellow for almost all of 2015.
However, since that initial fundraising drive, our fundraising efforts have not been as successful. If the DSF Fellowship is to continue, we're going to need to raise more money very soon.
What has become clear over this year is that it takes a lot of dedicated time and effort to execute a successful fundraising campaign. It's a job that requires persistence, regular follow-ups, and a specific set of people skills - things that are difficult for a community to provide on a volunteer basis. Given the importance of the DSF Fellowship to the long term maintenance of Django, we've decided to seek some professional help to raise the next round of funds for the DSF.
Adrienne Lowe is an organiser of PyLadies ATL and DjangoGirls ATL; she has also spoken at DjangoCon Europe, and maintains the DjangoGirls Your Django Story project. As well as being a notable contributor to the Django ecosystem, she's also a professionally trained chef (and baker of extremely delicious cookies).
In a past life, Adrienne directed fundraising efforts for a US university. Given her interest in the Django community, and her experience as a fundraiser, Adrienne has taken up a paid, part-time position as the Director of Advancement (that's a fancy word used for fundraising by philanthropic types).
The Director of Advancement position will run in much the same way as the Fellowship pilot program. We'll try this for three months to see if it works; if it does, the DSF will commit to funding the position full time.
So - if you're involved with the Django community, you can expect to be hearing from Adrienne in the near future as she comes knocking looking for donations of the DSF. If you've got any hot tips for people or companies to contact, please get in touch