Nothing wrong with the email text itself btw, it was nicely written.
It’s just the cryptic email title, correspondent name and email address that can be confusing to people.
About the text, I would not use this expression: “Besides that, you’ve not only contributed financially, but you’ve also been a helpful member of the community.”
It has many interpretations.
Your e-mail was still among the ones I’d hand-written; I’ll be using a template from now on, because that’s more sustainable in the long-term.
Right now I don’t think that’s something we need to think too much about. Just have a recongizable title and sender’s name. The text itself is fine.
The priority now is to get others who aren’t old members, core devs or prior core devs to 1) find out about the crowd funding and 2) be incentivised enough to contribute.
I predict that you aren’t going to see the estimated annual budget increase much more unless you work on the 2nd point and for that I believe you’ll need to prioritize the inetgration of pysically based renderer to the core Panda3D codebase. When you do that, you’ll have much more to present in your elevator pitch to people passing by on Google, Facebook, IndieDB, Github, itch.io, etc (ie. potential new users). I call it elevator pitch here because people are scrolling through a list in all of these places and don’t even have the time to check every single library beyond its homepage and features page, same way you have so little time to talk to a busy investor while he’s stuck with you for half a minute in an elevator.
Indeed, that’s already our plan, as you’ve been able to see in our tentative roadmap for 1.11. I will be focusing on that and announcing our exact intentions as soon as I get 1.10.2 (which has some critical bugfixes) out within the next days.
I have not seen the roadmap