As many friends and followers of Tor know by now, we spend the final weeks of each year asking for your help as part of our year-end fundraising campaign. For our 2020 campaign, we wanted a theme that conveys a positive message and speaks to the power of this kind of community action. That’s why we decided on the theme Use a Mask, Use Tor.
This August, we asked you to help us fundraise for our second annual Bug Smash Fund campaign. In 2020, despite the challenges of COVID-19 and event cancellations, you helped us to raise $106,709!
Today we are officially launching the Tor Project Membership Program, a new way for nonprofit and private sector organizations to financially support our work.
Starting August 1, every donation we receive during the month of August will count towards the Bug Smash Fund 2020. The Bug Smash Fund allows the Tor Project to find and fix bugs in our software and conduct routine maintenance.
At the beginning of August 2019, we asked you to help us build our very first Bug Smash Fund. This fund will ensure that the Tor Project has a healthy reserve earmarked for maintenance work and smashing the bugs necessary to keep Tor Browser, the Tor network, and the many tools that rely on Tor strong, safe, and running smoothly. We want to share a final update on the work the 2019 Bug Smash Fund made possible.
So far, we’ve marked 77 tickets with BugSmashFund. As of today, 56 of those tickets have been closed, and 21 of them are still in progress. With this reserve, we’ve been able to fix bugs and complete necessary maintenance on core tor, bridgedb, Snowflake, and Metrics, as well as complete the Tor Browser ESR 68 migration.
We are pleased to announce that we raised more funds in 2019 from individuals than ever before -- $833,956! This is almost double what we raised in 2018. A little over $300,000 of this income was donated during our end-of-year campaign and was generously matched by Mozilla. Thank you to everyone who contributed. You are helping Tor take back the internet.
I'd like to tell you about some of our work your contributions can help over the coming year. I'll be focusing on things that my team works on in the "tor" program itself.
This year’s campaign, Take Back the Internet, has been a great success so far. Thank you to the more than 3,000 donors who have helped us raise over $130,000 that will become over $260,000 with Mozilla’s match. This year we set an ambitious goal because the demand for privacy is growing and the demand on the Tor network and our small staff is also increasing.
It’s true that there is a lot at stake, and there are many well-funded adversaries. But we’ve seen some important victories in taking back the internet.
