Discussion regarding donations

Slack thread regarding donations:

Wade Striebel [Yesterday at 8:42 AM]
@jeffmcneill we are glad to have you here! Regarding donations, we ended up moving away from Open Collective as their fees were too high. We now use https://donate.classicpress.net/ to collect donations (minimum of $5) (edited)

6 replies
MarkB [20 hours ago]
Just a note (not complaining) @Wade Striebel The donate page does not allow “Any amount” minimum is $5usd. Yes I know that is a small amount for the platform…I am more than willing to donate that and more including my time, but saying “any amount” is not quite true… and unfortunately for me, I have to add another 35% - 40% for exchange at the moment. Which always sucks for me!

Wade Striebel [20 hours ago]
Didn’t realize it was a minimum of $5, I will adjust my message :slightly_smiling_face:

Wade Striebel [20 hours ago]
@jeffmcneill corrected my message, the donation on the site requires a minimum of $5 :slightly_smiling_face:

jeffmcneill [10 hours ago]
There are more issues than fees that should guide decisions on where/how to take donations. Minimum and minimum monthly are important. While $5 might not seem like much it does add up when people are more interested in $1 and $2/month options. Secondly there is the issue of discoverability. On Open Collective (and other such donation/membership platforms), people can discover your project, whereas having only a donate link on ones own site does not allow for that. Third, there is the issue of recognition and visibility of other donors. Having a few quotes is a very minimal kind of recognition, but with other platforms there is (can be) a cloud of avatar icons (this adds social trust indicators to join others in donating). Fourth, creating links back to donors (either indirectly through a member page like Open Collective, or directly from the donation page) is helpful for recognition as well as outbound links (with or without nofollow) being valuable to some donors. If you want to see an effective program run in-house, check out how Linux Mint does their donations (one time and recurring). They do sponsors, advertisements, donations (1 time/recurring), also use Patreon, and do cryptocurrency as well. It is important to get this right, if you want to maximize cashflow, much less grow the community of supporters. Donors - Linux Mint
linuxmint.com
Donations - Linux Mint
Linux Mint is an elegant, easy to use, up to date and comfortable GNU/Linux desktop distribution.

@Marketing Would be great to have a discussion regarding this.

I’m not sure I understand the 35%-40% exchange comment?

As for giving kudos, I agree 100%.

One thing I don’t want to see is hundreds of different places for donations. We will be shutting down Open Collective shortly.

I suppose if you have a currency that isn’t listed there you would have the exchange rate to deal with. I don’t think there is much we can do though in that regard.

What is the timeline on shutting down Open Collective?

We just need to ask people to transfer their donations to Donate Box - really struggling with time right now.

I’ve gone ahead and requested the OpenCollective page be shut down - I can reach out to donors individually at a later date.

I realize I am late to the party here and that the decisions may have already been made, but you can also get Stripe payments for non-profits at a discounted rate in the US. I believe it was 2.2% + 30¢ per transaction.

I am not sure what the UK and other rates are, but if anything, look into it for non-profits that you use Stripe for.

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My main comments are to suggest that a third party platform that is good at doing a “donation community” is possibly/likely worth a premium cost (especially when that cost is not up front but on a per donation basis). One of the most recognizable is Patreon. As mentioned above, Linux Mint uses that as well as direct donations with home-grown functionality for getting people’s names/urls into monthly blog posts:

This does require some amount of “community management” so should be a part of marketing rather than development, imho.

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This I can support. It has my vote :slight_smile:

I agree. I noticed that DonorBox.org charges the normal Stripe fee (2.9% + 30¢), but that is probably so they are making a little to support their own platform.

Can someone please submit a PR to our project’s main README file on GitHub to link to https://donate.classicpress.net instead of the OpenCollective page?

You can use this link: Sign in to GitHub · GitHub

Edit, this is done, thanks Wade!

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Exchange rate – not an issue at all if you use crypto.

Option 1: BTCPay - Bitcoin Wiki (prevents the address reuse issue, which to some is not an issue at all)

Option 2: get an electrum wallet / post the BTC address on classicpress site in header and/or footer. BTC donations get sent to that public address. The address reuse issue applies. What that means is that all donations to that address are publicly visible on the blockchain, which some argue is good for accountability, while others argue that privacy has benefits. Blockchain search is here: https://www.blockchain.com/explorer

Example: Wikipedia Foundation → Ways to give - Wikimedia Foundation

In order to actually spend cryptocurrency, you still need to deal with an exchange rate. Exchange rates from BTC to USD (for example) are usually much higher than “traditional” exchange rates.

Another option is to buy things directly in bitcoin / Ethereum / etc, but at the moment we aren’t using any services that accept them.

Here I mean: the spread built in to the exchange rate (the cost of doing the trade) is higher than the spread built into traditional forex rates.

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