Raising funds - how should we?

paul_c2

I'd just go with voluntary donations, with a good amount of publicity about how to donate etc.

As soon as you start with some kind of subscription to post classifieds, or restricting PMs etc then in addition to granting the access (which can be automated), you'd need to un-grant the access after 1 year - unless you want a payment to be for a lifetime.

It would be impractical to restrict PMs - would you really want to restrict the entire PM system, only to make the classifieds a pay-area? If not, then how do you prevent people simply observing the username posted in the classifieds area and PMing or contacting by some other means?

ThorpyFX

as a starter for ten id suggest a message to every members inbox giving your PayPal account details. Request a voluntary donation, as small as £1 and as large as they may feel useful.

Thereafter, if that doesn't work I'd relook at the problem and come up with some advertising/ subscription option. Point one buys you time, point two thereafter can be implemented in a more relaxed manner and with the clarity a lack of pressure brings.

Wazmeister

2 or 3 different levels of voluntary membership... like TGP

TTony

More interesting comment.

I've always tried to raise funds by offering something (t-shirts, mugs, calendars) in return.  Rather than just saying "give us your money".  Interesting number of people saying that they didn't want a calendar, so didn't pay/donate (which was slightly missing the point).  Some donated anyway, recognising that the calendar sale was actually a fund-raising in disguise.

As I said on the original thread, selling £600-worth of calendars was much harder work then selling £10,000 worth of guitars.

We've run raffles for donated prizes before (ThorpyFx being a generous donor), and even that has been a hard sell to get the donations in.

Putting it another way, raising £100 in donations probably costs >£200 of my time.



And it's usually the same people who support these efforts.  I'd guess that 50 members (out of 7,500) have contributed 90% of the funds we've ever raised.  That doesn't sit well with my idea of "fairness".

Winny_Pooh

digitalscream said:

As for admin time, since it's come up a few times...I'd guess that if we were to put a value on the admin time equal to our salaries, we'd be looking at > £100k since we opened the doors. There's no way we'd ever be able to support that, so we just don't get paid

However, it's worth noting that our direct hosting costs have increased by about 20% thanks to the currency crash after the Brexit vote. We're not immune to it, either...

EDIT: With the suggestion of paying for access to the classifieds...it's all well and good everybody in this discussion saying they'd be happy to pay, but...you're all regulars. We rely on the classifieds to bring in new members (if you're not growing, you're shrinking), and putting a barrier in front of that - even if it's not immediate, but rather "start off for free, and pay if you like it" - many people see that and click away, so it's almost certainly going to hit that growth.

The way I see it, what is the benefit to this growth if it costs you more in bandwidth and time? Surely growth is only benificial if it helps pay for itself which in this case it's not. I don't cone here because of the size of the community, rather the quality, which is why I no longer enjoyed the TDPRI when it got much busier.

I think the existence of this thread points to the fact that you need a paywall, surely we've figured from internet piracy that 90% of people usually take the free option unless literally forced otherwise. 

So we're back to: 
Ads or paid classifieds access. 

TTony

Winny_Pooh said:

So we're back to: 
Ads or paid classifieds access. 

And ...
(1) our stated commitment to being ad-free,  
(2) adblockers
... Takes away one of those options. 

Moe_Zambeek

Personally then, givenTTonys comments, I'd just implement a mandatory £1-5 yearly membership for all members, maybe with a 30 day trial period. If you've got 7500 members you could probably raise at least 3500 at £1 memberships. But is that enough to cover costs? 

hywelg

I'd happily pay 2-3% for each item I sell through here. Its so hassle free its worth it.

Alternately put @ICBM answers to tech problems behind a paywall !!

monquixote

Moe_Zambeek said:

Personally then, givenTTonys comments, I'd just implement a mandatory £1-5 yearly membership for all members, maybe with a 30 day trial period. If you've got 7500 members you could probably raise at least 3500 at £1 memberships. But is that enough to cover costs? 

That would result in dead site within 6 months.

guitarfishbay

Payment has to be voluntary and there should be no paywalls to classifieds. I'm one of the people who joined for classifieds access back on MR and now I post here regularly... the conversion rate is probably small but I doubt I'd have signed up to the site if classifieds was via a paywall.

On basschat you can buy in the classifieds without paying, the sellers pay the fees to list. If there was a paywall to contact sellers I wouldn't have used it tbh. Not all contact will translate into completed deals so the value for money isn't there for 'opportunity' - there are loads of places to buy guitar gear already at no cost to the buyer.

Either a Wikipedia style yearly or biannual funds drive, or a monthly low cost donation setup via PayPal (if it can actually be done I'd rather give £1-2 a month and just leave it running).

A direct PM campaign with a supporting sticky thread is probably better than just a sticky selling item of the month etc..

Or a mix of all of those, plus competition raffles.

DanR

Could you not run an affiliate scheme with someone.

Say I need some strings I put a fretboard code in and you get a small kickback for sending me there?

Could you have a fretboard store which stocked tshirts/pick/strings etc?

Fretwired

Sell Frets .. I'd buy them ...

How much for 100,000?

:-)

digitalscream

Fretwired said:

Sell Frets .. I'd buy them ...

How much for 100,000?

:-)

Believe it or not, I did suggest this way-back-when. It wasn't well-received, and rightly so (I do come up with some silly ideas sometimes).

ourmaninthenorth

TTony said:

More interesting comment.

I've always tried to raise funds by offering something (t-shirts, mugs, calendars) in return.  Rather than just saying "give us your money".  Interesting number of people saying that they didn't want a calendar, so didn't pay/donate (which was slightly missing the point).  Some donated anyway, recognising that the calendar sale was actually a fund-raising in disguise.

As I said on the original thread, selling £600-worth of calendars was much harder work then selling £10,000 worth of guitars.

We've run raffles for donated prizes before (ThorpyFx being a generous donor), and even that has been a hard sell to get the donations in.

Putting it another way, raising £100 in donations probably costs >£200 of my time.



And it's usually the same people who support these efforts.  I'd guess that 50 members (out of 7,500) have contributed 90% of the funds we've ever raised.  That doesn't sit well with my idea of "fairness".

Are you being disingenuous for a specific reason?  The £10k of guitars were advertised here, but they didn't sell here, a fact already evidenced and presumably acknowledged. 

I'll ask one more time. A further none specific answer?  I'll get the message loud and clear, you won't hear from me again on this issue. 

Break it down..what does this forum need to be self supporting without outside contributions, is the £7000 per annum hinted at above accurate? 

digitalscream

ourmaninthenorth said:

Break it down..what does this forum need to be self supporting without outside contributions? 

We're genuinely not being cagey here - it's kind of hard to pin down, and somewhat irrelevant. There are things we've got planned for the next 12 months which will (potentially) ramp up the cost quite a bit, but also potentially pull money in. How we go about those things will kinda depend on how much money we've got.

Chicken, meet egg.

As for "those things", I'm being deliberately cagey on that point because we don't want to promise stuff that we can't deliver.

That's potentially another way to do it, actually...a Kickstarter for keeping the lights on for another year, with the extra features as stretch goals.

Fretwired

digitalscream said:

Fretwired said:

Sell Frets .. I'd buy them ...

How much for 100,000?

:-)

Believe it or not, I did suggest this way-back-when. It wasn't well-received, and rightly so (I do come up with some silly ideas sometimes).

Being serious I'd take the Wiki approach and ask for donations and maybe issue a donor badge. If you value the forum make a donation.

guitarfishbay

Honestly the donor badge thing is ok I think... I totally understand not wanting people to be able to buy 'status' but I literally only care to know if someone is a trade poster (I don't think we yet have an issue with shill posters, but we might eventually).

ourmaninthenorth

digitalscream said:

ourmaninthenorth said:

Break it down..what does this forum need to be self supporting without outside contributions? 

We're genuinely not being cagey here - it's kind of hard to pin down, and somewhat irrelevant. There are things we've got planned for the next 12 months which will (potentially) ramp up the cost quite a bit, but also potentially pull money in. How we go about those things will kinda depend on how much money we've got.

Chicken, meet egg.

As for "those things", I'm being deliberately cagey on that point because we don't want to promise stuff that we can't deliver.

That's potentially another way to do it, actually...a Kickstarter for keeping the lights on for another year, with the extra features as stretch goals.

Then not really irrelevant if the implementation of future plans rely on a quantification of current funding. Entirely relevant one would have thought? 

Keeping the lights on is obviously the primary focus, maybe a re-think and consolidation of that, before any expansionary thoughts?  

paul_c2

digitalscream said:

ourmaninthenorth said:

Break it down..what does this forum need to be self supporting without outside contributions? 

We're genuinely not being cagey here - it's kind of hard to pin down, and somewhat irrelevant. There are things we've got planned for the next 12 months which will (potentially) ramp up the cost quite a bit, but also potentially pull money in. How we go about those things will kinda depend on how much money we've got.

Chicken, meet egg.

As for "those things", I'm being deliberately cagey on that point because we don't want to promise stuff that we can't deliver.

That's potentially another way to do it, actually...a Kickstarter for keeping the lights on for another year, with the extra features as stretch goals.

Ok put it another way: whats the 1) "have to pay" costs and the 2) "want to do" costs? We need some kind of idea how much it costs.

And, if your hourly rate is such that £100 of funding in, costs you £200, then you need to recognise that the £200 figure isn't a "real" one (since you didn't actually charge it, and take the money from website funds??) or that there's better/more efficient ways to do things.

Heartfeltdawn

Go for the donation angle with a doner badge for each giver first. Someone who donates a minimum of £5 to the site is more likely to be trustworthy when it comes to buying and selling, giving added reassurance in the classifieds.