My Favorite Time to Support Charitable Nonpofits

by Karen Sandler on April 15, 2015

Most nonprofits push for donations in December to try to cash in on the giving spirit and the end of the calendar year deadline for tax deductions. Conservancy is no exception - we launched our Supporter program at the beginning of December and promoted that as much as we could until the end of the year. Because this is on everyone's minds, there are a lot of blogposts recommending which charities you should donate to and match challenges lined up to get people excited. While the end of the year is a fine time to contribute to nonprofits, to me the best time to make donations is today. Today is Tax Day in the United States. It's the deadline that everyone scrambles against to file their taxes and hopefully, if this is you, then by the end of today you've made it [1]!

If you got a refund, putting some of what feels like a windfall to a good cause is just the thing. It's nice not to have to worry about remembering to make donations at the end of the year. And if you wish you'd paid less in taxes, it may benefit you next year to make more charitable contributions./p>

Even if you're outside the U.S. or if you're not in a tax situation where charitable donations make a difference to you the donation will make a huge difference to your favorite nonprofits and their ability to budget, as many of them are in the first quarter of their fiscal year.

[1]As painful as it may have been. I'm glad I'm on the FSF's High Priorities Projects Committee to push for inclusion of tax software. It's really upsetting that there's no free alternative.

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Tags: conservancy, supporter

April 3rd last chance to donate towards Compliance Match

by Karen Sandler on April 2, 2015

Tomorrow is the last day to contribute towards Conservancy's $50,000 anonymous match! We've made great progress and are tantalizingly close to making the full goal. We're now 97.8% of the way there. You can help us close the gap — just 11 Supporter sign ups will do it!

If you want more details about the suit that Christoph Hellwig is bringing against VMware in Germany, you can read our FAQ or watch the video below of my keynote at LibrePlanet on the topic.

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Tags: conservancy, GPL, supporter

Supporter Video: Jono Bacon

by Karen Sandler on January 30, 2015

Check out this video of Jono Bacon, Senior Director of Community at the XPrize Foundation and former Ubuntu Community Manager at Canonical, talking about Conservancy and why he is a Supporter. "We need to protect the current generation of free and open source projects and also pave the way to a brighter future," explains Jono in the video.

Many thanks to Jono for supporting sofware freedom and our organization! Join Jono and become a supporter of Conservancy today.

Also thanks to Bastian Ilsø for helping us to put this together and to Javier Suarez (jahzzar) for freely licensing his song, "I need", under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported (CC BY-SA 3.0), which we used in the video.

If you are at FOSDEM today, sign up as a Supporter and come to our dinner tonight for free. If you aren't yet ready to sign up as an official Supporter, tickets are still available at the door.

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Tags: conservancy, supporter

Happy New Year from Conservancy and Video from Mike Linksvayer

by Karen Sandler on December 31, 2014

As we wrap up 2014 we are grateful for all of the fantastic participation from our hundreds of volunteers across our many member projects.

The best thing about launching our Supporter program is the all of the positive feedback we've gotten. We are realizing that we need to draw attention to all of the work we and our projects are doing and invite you to help us do that!

Along these lines, we're pleased to publish this video from Mike Linksvayer. Mike is on Conservancy's board of directors and is a member of our evaluation committee. You can watch the video to hear why he volunteers his time with Conservancy and why he has also chosen to become a Conservancy Supporter.

Many thanks to Bastian Ilsø for helping us to put this together and to Javier Suarez (jahzzar) for freely licensing his song, "I need", under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported (CC BY-SA 3.0), which we used in the video.

We're getting excited about all of the things we have in the works for 2015! Please become a Conservancy Supporter to help us continue our mission. Have a great holiday and all the best in 2015.

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Tags: conservancy, supporter