Proposal For MoFo Data

Proposal for Capturing Financial Information for Mozilla Foundation

Summary: Mozilla Foundation amasses data about our donors, the causes they give to and how they match up against our fundraising and engagement targets. We need an effective framework for communicating progress against these targets.

Current Challenge of Process for Fundraising Data Pulling:

• PayPal monthly reports are tedious to mine
• Challenging to view the progress of the campaign
• Data analysis is infrequent and time consuming since information needs to be analyzed and recorded to know how many specific projects receive donations
• MoFo needs to report this data monthly
• The process often involves the duplication of work

Objective:

To present Mozilla Foundation's donation and financial reporting in an accurate and timely way in order to track fundraising progress for campaigns.

Project Timeline: Two-three weeks, approximately.

Teams/Individuals Involved:

• Mozilla Foundation
• Metrics (Metrics Architect), Analytics, Business Intelligence
• Web Development (later phase)
• Accounting/Finance

General Project Plan:

Phase I: Mozilla Foundation members discuss internally a strategy for automating data pulling.

Phase II: Plan 2-3 meetings between the Foundation and Metrics team to determine what decisions need to be made for donations PayPal process

• Discussion points for meeting: determine what questions have to be answered
• Do we direct our focus to manipulate these funds?
• For internal use, what is MoFo's goal?: To determine which projects we donate to? Do we focus solely on the income side of the equation, or do we need to consider ways to equate the donations with how the money is used?
• For external use: Is our goal to present information to our donor and/or to encourage others to make the decision to donate more money along a path that we dictate (does this go against the idea of Choice for users)? i.e. are there areas that we feel donors should be encouraged to donate to in particular?

Phase III: Once process is determined, Metrics team would be able to use the data retrieval API to query for information from system, authenticate and retrieve account totals so there is no chance of data being misplaced. We would be able to retrieve information from the last thirty days for the web request.

• By creating a script, the process would be completely automated on a regular schedule (i.e. weekly or monthly); if this is not possible, there would need to be a push process so we could retrieve the latest data.
• From PayPal, Metrics can sparse the spreadsheet into a CSV file
• IT will have information on how much was donated, the time of day, which causes were donated to, where we get our donations.

Phase IV: Using data

• Metrics can extract this information so MoFo can have the data for email, newsletters or general dashboard on website. Having this information would would make disseminating the information easier to deploy.
• Other options: use Flot to plot donation trend information privately (for the board) give MoFo access to this for long term trending.
• Work with WebDev and determine what donation information will be open to the public for website.

Benefits for MoFo, MoCo and Community:

• MoFo would be able to access internal dashboards for reporting financial information readily.
• For MoCo, this project helps build depth for the Corporation/Metrics team by developing a useful financial tool for Mozilla Accounting/Finance and as a research project for budgeting.
• Community: This would be a resource for prospective or existing donors. Among the different classes of donors, long time/scheduled or repeat donors would be able to look at how much they've donated over time and/or how their funds are being used.

Weaknesses/Threats:

• Accessing PayPal may be challenging to work with if we use an API because of password access
• MoFo may not be able to to share financial information when working with teams outside of the Foundation
• May be challenging to scrape the data
• Collaborating across teams may be challenging
• Planning process may be tedious
• Does MoFo need to be careful to separate itself on projects with MoCo?

Strengths/Opportunities:

• Quicker mining of data
• More accurate results
• Builds a pipeline for metrics and reporting at Mozilla
• More information crossover among teams and collaboration
• Strengthens the Finance/Accounting for their own data reporting by using this project as a test case
• Encourages methods to report financial information to Mozilla, internally and externally
• Develops accountability and transparency for our reporting (i.e. on website, newsletters, etc.)
• Creates processes for the Foundation and a detailed paper trail.
• Once the data is produced, there may be the opportunity to have a visual reference of donation progress on Mozilla's homepage
• Mozilla currently does not have a lot of data that is being made directly available to the public at the moment--having an efficient data pulling system builds a paper trail and make a more streamlined system for record-keeping.
• Automation of data system helps build the furtherment of the Metrics team for Mozilla Corporate and building a systematized approach for Mozilla Accounting/Finance (Jim Cook).

General ideas/References for Project:

• Use PayPal's Donations Tracking system which allows organizations to automatically track up-to-date donation totals to help increase donations for web-based campaigns. PayPal tools also provides instant feedback to donors and potential donors. By using this, each account includes an unlimited number of campaigns and graphical views to track multiple goals even on multiple websites that share the same PayPal account. Donations Tracker Example
• Create a concentrated one-week campaign for Mozilla Foundation when Firefox features a donation option so people can contribute to the Foundation.
• Have a live feed of people who've donated (voluntary option, depending on privacy issues)
• Example of one way to present a Monthly Totals Chart for Mozilla Foundation data
• References: Mozill Metrics Blog