Can someone
please alter the AlertPay donation options to permit low-level recurring donations every month?
£5 a month is £60 a year. I pay less of an annual fee for most electronic forms of media and entertainment. That isn't a value judgment, just a statement of fact.
If the site is truly struggling for cash, make it so that people have the option of setting up a regular donation of £1-2 per month or something.
...
The trick then is to make it socially desirable to do so. To me, you also need to start adding a customised title for regular donors (should they want it). A change in name colour, a status tag... anything that visually recognises ongoing support - bit like the
poppy effect...
Ok, would you agree there is a threshold at which a minimum contribution is not worth the processing? After conversion fees and exchange rates, a $'X' or £'Y' gets donated and ends up as 'z' euro in our account? We can't argue against 'every little bit helps' even it if were less than a euro.....but there is a level of practicality here we need to keep in mind. The current minimum is '5' which was viewed to be the that threshold for making the transaction worthwhile for those involved.....though I have a hard time turning away £1-2
![:\](https://bluelight.org/xf/BL_Images/Orig_Emoji/wrygrin.gif "wry grin :\")
Perhaps this 5 euro minimum *IS* a factor in why we only get about 10-15 members a month donating (most of them are on subscription, fwiw), though most of them are averaging 28-30 euro a month (very awesome of them....though admittedly a bulk of our members can't or won't donate that much on a monthly basis).
As an alternative, I was hoping we could make it a 5 euro minimum for every 3 or 6 months, to ease that pain....but I hadn't raised that option since I expect more people prefer a more frequent (monthly) donation of a smaller amount over a semi-larger amount that pops up ever few months. My suggestion...kept to myself.
I'll take it back to those involved and see if the '5' is still a functional minimum or if we can lower it and still be effective. Who knows, maybe this would be the move to stimulate the other 99.9% of our members to actually pitch in.
For your bit about giving them something in return, that's been discussed earlier in this thread for those who haven't read it. There are suggestions of a donor log, perks such as custom titles, widgets, whatever.....none of those have been brought out as implemented or even trialed in these many months. Why? I could say it is because we don't want to invest time in site modifications that may not carry over into an upgrade (yes, we still have a few of those out in front of us somewhere) - this answer is partially the reason. The bigger reason is we haven't had the time, as we've focused on other issues until now - which I'll get into at my closing statement below.
.
I have been asked if we could add a few more options for the donations.
Paypal and bank transfer being the most asked for
For alternatives to alertpay - I'll point to the first post in this thread:
Why Paypal?
Because it was the quickest and easiest to implement at this time. We are exploring other avenues to receive donations, and we will post them as they come online.
Why AlertPay?
Because Paypal blindly blocked our use of their services under their classifications of 'drug' or other possibly illegal activities. We know better, but they simply asked us to take our business elsewhere. Our owner, johnboy, has been able to set up an AlertPay account which should not suffer these types of account closures.
Paypal was used...
they dropped
us.
And they made it clear at the time they did not wish to associate with a 'drug' site like ours 8) The actual
Donate page gets into the alternative methods of payment, and a bigger explanation of how people can get monies into the alertpay account via bank transfers and such.
I'll concede, I thought we had an alternative direct transfer option before, but I do not see it now. That may have been removed when we shifted to Alertpay.
While I have the soapbox on this topic, I'll point out that we added a US PO Box per the request of several American members. After a year of operation, we have received not a single thing from anyone. Not even an IOU.
It begs the question of why we are paying to have it. I cannot say if anything has come in via the Aus Postal address, but will find out.
.
Now to follow up with why what's been happening as of late, which some may ask, or not
- Transparency? - This is meant to reference the 'Expenses' as well as 'Donations' since we have no reason or intent to hide anything from the members. We've gotten the donation bar up there, and we are updating it (manually) monthly with the amount and number of donations. We do this so you can see about how many people from our HUGE membership are actually donating, and how far below our needs this is (hence, I assume, Tambo's request to allow smaller donations by a larger number of people). There isn't much more we can do to make this visible (other than the donor log or some such 'thank you' list).....though we're open to suggestions. It should be pointed out that the numbers are reported in euro, but the donations are coming in from various countries and being converted (after banking fees). Also, the 6.5k euro needed for this year is our hosting costs, this is nothing to address our needs for next year, or any additional monies needed for 'safety' or additional expenses (meaning any legal counsel to help protect the site, any costs associated with transitioning the site from sole ownership to legal charity status, or the actual banking fees, etc).
- Upgrade? - As noted, we are intending to make a minor upgrade soon. This was intended to be around the August time frame, but that was delayed by some real world obligations for the hands that would do it. We'll update that time line once we know for sure when it would occur. As for the bigger upgrade to the newest version of the software....as SA pointed out, it's a major headache, so we will be putting that off (all signs point to not 2010). And for the record, the upgrade *is* a real reason of why certain 'perks' are not being worked on, in addition to the lack of time for those who could do it.
- Time? - I've pointed out the lack of online time for those required for the work. This is something of a joke on this site, in that everything runs on Bluelight time (slower than Jamaican time, for those not in on the joke). But that is the nature of a 'volunteer' site with limited people both capable and willing to do what's needed. We apologize if things don't move as fast as some might think they ought to, but that has always been a fact for this site given it's dependency on 'volunteers'. It also doesn't help when we lose a good portion of our senior staff with turnover or absences (death, real world demands, or basic unexpected disappearances given the nature of drug users). This leaves the rest of us stretched thinner to cover the day-to-day site needs. Additionally, we are now spending some of our time on 'Status'.
- Status? - This is one that johnboy mentioned early on, and it is a desire to transition the site from single ownership to that of a charity, run by a transparent board or group of directors. Our current situation is untenable for the individual (given the tremendous legal and emotional strain having your name hanging on something like this), and for the site (seeking an individual's approval or action on certain items, and living under the shadow of an individual's whim). We are seeking to have the site ownership changed (both the owner and the admin are in favor of this), and the expectation is for this to be completed this calendar year. We'll make it public knowledge when certain things are in place, as people would want to know, but for know we can only say 'this is the direction, and the planned time'. Fair warning would say that this may effect our banking options (hopefully create more avenues for people to provide money), but we'd need that charitable entity established before those things can be created.
- Non-member funding? - While we are recording the handful of donors and their money in our initial post of this thread, there isn't a reflection of any change from the 'Drug Studies' work we've done - most notably the work with Inflexxion and MAPS. We can say that their money has come in, and does help in paying the 6.5k euro due this year. What we don't want to say is exactly how much they put in - the reasoning being that it doesn't cover all our needs magically (so we don't want members to sit back and say "it is covered, I don't need to give", since the gap remains), and also because we may seek further studies with them or other partners, and we'd rather not have a bar set too low (or too high, for that matter) publicly which would hamper our negotiations for other such studies. We should, however, pause for a moment to thank ALL of those who participated in the studies - it blew their socks off to have the response Bluelight members were able to provide....this goes a ways to securing better negotiations for us in the future. Thank you all.
But, the gap remains...certainly for this year. Can we get another study to help close the gap? We're working on that, but it isn't in place so we can't say it will or won't happen. Additionally, anyone can see from the donations that we won't reach our goal on members alone (expect a push for members soon - maybe with a tied in announcement of lower subscriptions available :D )...so what else is there? For one, there was the option of an auction (similar to erowid's special gifts for donors) - this is still possible, but not in planning right now. For two, there is the option of ads, loathed by many of us, but still a possibility for passive revenue streaming which we are evaluating our site statistics for now to see what impact it could bring for us (we may also use this as a stick during that member drive ). For three, there are the perks discussed above, which are not in development given our upgrade and available-time situation.
I have dropped, yet another, "TLB;dr" for you guys. Sorry. Quick form:
Tambo - we'll check into smaller donation amounts; perks and recognition still on hold.
Bearlove - Alertpay is what we have for now, and that won't change until the end of the year (at the soonest, if at all); perks and recognition noted above.
All - TLB writes a lot. But there's an update for ya, nonetheless.
