The current Dashboard utilizes the WordPress plugin LearnDash's default dashboard. It is simply not visually appealing, has no customizability, and does not display the most helpful information to either learners and administrators. We need $249 to buy a license for an advanced LearnDash extension which overhauls the dashboard.

Courses should be interactive, and forums that allow students to discuss material and dive into it further will enable just that. $29/year will be spent on a subscription integration that allows forums software to be used with LearnDash, our Learning Management System (LMS).

The funds would be used to design images for main pages, such as the home page. The stock image currently present will be replaced by an authentic illustration that further defines the brand of Knowledge for Free. Additionally, each course will get an associated illustration to make it fun and engaging to prospective learners.

This site was built by hand using WordPress by a volunteer non-expert to save costs. This comes with some short-comings in the back-end. $1,500 will be budgeted toward hiring a professional to cleanup back-end issues, such as security, effective data storage, faster page loading, proper caching, and more. With any remaining money in this category, we will ask the developer to make front-end and user interface updates to better suit learners.

Knowledge for Free has a long way to go until it can become incorporated and obtain non-profit status in order to solicit significant and public contributions that are tax-deductible. That long way's name is $5,000 which is the high end quote from a legal company that specializes in these services for non-profit startups like us. Since this is the high-end estimate, any excess money will be reinvested into website optimization if needed, or will be saved for future improvements and necessities.

This is a yearly cost that allows the site to remain up and running reliably. All websites must be hosted on a server, and we contract a hosting company to do this for us, since we do not have the facilities to maintain servers nor support the web traffic.

We use Google to support staff emails and shared workspaces. Other Google services such as calendars and collaborative features allow Knowledge for Free to maintain an office-free, yet productive and cohesive workspace. This service, unforunately, is not free and has a yearly cost associated with it.

While this service is technically a monthly subscription, we plan to contract it for only a month to perform an initial SEO optimization on the site. This will get the site to rank higher on search engine results, so we can reach more learners and donors.

We require experts to handle marketing on the Internet. Contracting this service to a firm for $399 a month is much cheaper than doing it in house. Our hope is that the cost of marketing will be exceeded by the donations those new people bring to the table.

There is always the unexpected, and we like to be prepared. This money will be saved for future upgrades and expenses if it is not needed.