Crowdfunding Pitch

Wiki ▸ Crowdfunding Pitch

A pitch for our crowdfunding campaign(s). As this is currently a work-in-progress, this page may contain information or suggestions from several different simultaneous campaigns.

ℹ️ See also: Buoy Promotional Campaigns

Vitals

• Titles:
  • Buoy: Empowering Community-Based Crisis Response
  • Better Angels' Buoy: Empowering The People's 9-1-1
  • Better Angels' Buoy: Help build an anti-policing next generation crisis response system!
• Taglines:
  • A new app that tells your friends where you are and what you need in any emergency.
  • A new community-driven emergency response tool powered by friendship.
• Fundraising goals:
  • $25,000 (or higher, see Stretch Goals)
• Timelines: Open-ended at first, perhaps time-limited when specific opportunities present themselves

Outline

(these are just notes, all of this needs to be re-worded)

1. The problem

• Imagine being in a bad situation…

1. The solution

• Buoy helps you in those situations…

1. Project roadmap

• More stuff we want Buoy to be capable of doing

1. Additional details:
2. The team
3. Budget

• Stretch goals

1. etc…?
2. Other ways to help
3. Donate elsewhere
4. Translate Buoy into your language
5. Share our story!

Story

You're walking home and notice someone following you…maybe? Maybe they're just going the same direction? But it's still making you nervous. You don't want to call 911, but you want your friends to know where you are and what you need.

Imagine you're in a relationship with a partner who gets angry when he drinks. You're worried about how things are going tonight. You don't want to call the police, but you wish you could reach out to someone you trust. Or you're going to political protest and may get harassed by cops. Or you've hurt yourself badly but don't want to go to the hospital because you're tripping balls. Or you're young, transgender, homeless, undocumented, a sex worker, a person of color, disabled, queer…and in trouble. And you need a friend. Right. Now.

Everyone needs help sometimes. 911 isn't the best or safest phone call to make in all or even most emergency situations. This is where Buoy comes in.

Buoy is a new software tool designed for people in crisis. In almost any emergency, Buoy users can augment or replace a 911 call with a Buoy Alert, instantly notifying their personally-selected network of friends, allies, and advocates of their location and situation. Most importantly, a shared Incident Map allows these trusted responders to coordinate with each other in real-time to best assist the victim.

Buoy can be used for many emergency and non-emergency situations. It is a privacy-respecting, secure tool that can be used by groups and organizations of any size ranging from national organizations like the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence (NCADV) to local community groups, all without any cost. Buoy is free software and is fully customizable.

The first version of Buoy won 1^st place at the the Fall 2015 Tech For Justice-sponsored competition in Albuquerque, New Mexico and is currently being tested for implementation in several community settings, including domestic violence shelters, addiction recovery support groups, and volunteer medical response collectives in several US States.

We need your help to make Buoy better, so it can go from "1.0" to "2.0" and can be used by even more people. We’re asking folks to pitch in and make that happen. Will you help?

Project roadmap

We've built version 1 of Buoy from the ground up without a single dime, and proven that a community-driven crisis response tool can empower communities in need. But now we want to take it to the next level. Some of our goals for the next version include:

• A txt-based interface so people who don't have smartphones can also use it.
• A fully translated interface so Buoy can be used by people who speak Spanish, Hindi and many other languages.
• The ability to stream audio and video of an incident to responders and a Buoy server for safekeeping.
• And many more enhancements!

❓ Not sure how to do this part, need help. Maybe something like describing feature sets in terms of programming hours, or break down between funds for programming (translation: food and coffee) and outreach (translation: gas money and car maintenance).

Project team

Buoy is built by the Better Angels collective, who believe that in situations where traditional emergency services are not available, reliable, trustworthy, or sufficient, communities can come together to aid each other in times of need. In the spirit of software development as direct action, we design, develop, and deploy free software intended to have the maximum social impact, using the minimum lines of code, as quickly as possible.

❓ I think it might be a good move to mention who we are, as individuals, and come up with some formalized "role" for what we do. Obviously, this is fungible, but I think this gives our campaign more legitimacy. Here's a shot at an introduction. Edit at will.

Over the last several years, we’ve been slowly building up our team of core contributors to Better Angels projects. Below you’ll find photos of our core team, and a bit about who we are and what we do for the project. We’d also like to recognize the many contributions of patches, bug reports, feedback and ideas we received from members of our larger community.

* Rebecca Crane * Founder, user experience lead * GPG/PGP key info: [0x9D34BA4A7E0021BA](https://pgp.mit.edu/pks/lookup?op=get&search=0x9D34BA4A7E0021BA) * Maymay * Principal software architect, lead web services developer * GPG/PGP key info: [0x0900E4EB4DB88B59](https://pgp.mit.edu/pks/lookup?search=0x0900E4EB4DB88B59&op=index) * Hannah Hubbard * Director of operations, communications lead * GPG/PGP key info: [0x0D53F06FBDDAD196](http://www.techforjustice.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/Hannah_pub.asc) * Nitish Narula * Creative technologist, storymaker developer * GPG/PGP key info: [0xCF0158F96BC66E44](https://pgp.mit.edu/pks/lookup?search=0xCF0158F96BC66E44&op=index)

• Christy Leos

• Beta test program coordinator

• Melissa Mullinax

• Evangelist, alpha user extraordinaire

• …TK-anyone else?

Budget

We’ve made a lot of progress on Buoy through sheer dedication alone, but we want to take it further. $25,000 will allow us to pay our primary developer, who has been working full-time on Buoy for free for the past three months, as well as paying for graphic design, hiring translators, covering IndieGoGo’s platform fees, and funding outreach efforts such as personally visiting regional domestic violence shelters, addiction recovery centers, etcetera to help them integrate Buoy into their existing client support processes.

If we surpass our fundraising goal, we will add increasingly advanced features to Buoy, such as:

• Integration with more existing, popular messaging services like Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, and Twitter DMs.
• The ability to use and manage multiple accounts on many different community Buoys from a single interface.
• An "beacon" mode where sending an alert will also strobe your camera flash to make it easier for responders to find you in the dark.
• The ability to automatically open/close, or turn on/off Internet-of-Things enabled locks, doors, and webcams to ensure you have a safe "panic route" in case of emergency within a predefined area, such as your home or office.

These ideas and many more are already on our project roadmap, but we need your help to make sure we can see these through and keep Buoy free, for everyone, forever. And if you have an idea of your own that we haven't dreamed up yet, you can add it to our roadmap yourself. :)

Other ways to help!

In addition to contributing to our crowdfunding campaign, you can also:

• Donate BitCoins to 1KYJnfoTDG1izoV89cH68GX6LTrDVz24bw, or via any other method listed at our developer's Cyberbusking.org donation portal.
• Translate Buoy from English into another language.
• Find and fix bugs.
• Share our story!

Learn more about getting involved in the Buoy project.

Perks/Rewards

Ideas for "perks"/"rewards" sorted by increasing "value."

1. TK-more ideas?
2. Your name will appear in the Buoy "About & Credits" screen.
3. Your name will appear linked to a web address of your choosing in the Buoy "About & Credits" screen.
4. Participate in a full-day programming tutorial workshop lead by the Buoy developers. We will be running three of these full-day programming workshops, one for "beginners," one for "experienced," and one for "experts."
5. A four-hour personal, one-on-one programming workshop with the Buoy developers tailored to your level of experience.
6. We will remotely assist your group or organization in setting up a Buoy instance for your clients.
7. One of the Better Angels will visit you at your organization and work with your technical and social services staff to implement Buoy into your existing support processes. (Some travel restrictions may apply; contact us for details.)

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(This is a space meant for brainstorming. Think of this as the editor's cutting room floor.)

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