Hello,
I put together some ideas for the donation page. We have the problem that we
basically get no donations any more outside of the wishlist and even those are
frankly way too low. The don't even cover our cost.
And since we a providing a good product here which saves people a lot of money
we should not be afraid to ask for donations. Of course it is still free for
everyone to donate or not, but some people need to be reminded that this
possibility exists.
So we will now add some new features: We will allow donations via credit card
and standing order to make this really hassle-free and we will allow recurring
donations because some people prefer to give a small amount each month instead
of a big amount once a year.
We will also remove the variety of currencies and just use EUR & USD and suggest
depending on GeoIP which one is default. USD will be default for the US and
Canada obviously, but we will try to encourage people to use EUR when ever
possible since we pay less fees.
Payment options are credit card & SEPA direct debit which support recurring
donations. We don't support that with PayPal at the moment, but I think I will
need to implement their API.
I would like to suggest amounts to donate. That seems to be common practice. We
should have 250, 100, 50, 25, 10 and a custom option where people can enter what
ever they want. The minimum should be 1 (EUR/USD). If a recurring donation is
picked, we should use some JS to halve the amount on those buttons.
We have to get the full name and address of the person who donates for tax
reasons and secondly to get the payments through because the credit card
companies validate those against their own database.
We will also collect the email address to get in touch with people.
So in the end the process will look like this:
1) Person selects one-time/monthly payment, an amount by clicking on a button
and selects the payment type. Click something like "Donate Now".
2) A form is shown to enter name, email & address.
3) Redirect to payment provider to enter credit card stuff, etc.
4) Payment provider redirects back to a thank you page
This is probably a good example and done quite similar:
https://donate.mozilla.org/
I have also written a few new texts that probably need a little bit of
refinement, but should be a good start:
Why should I donate?
We are proud of what we are doing here at IPFire. We create a free firewall
distribution that is free to use for everyone anywhere in the world. To do that,
we need to provide the infrastructure to distribute it to our users and provide
the right tools for our developers to help them to make IPFire better every day.
Donations from individuals and corporations are the only way to keep all of our
services free for everyone. They pay for hosting, advertising, purchase
equipment and to fund the work of the people behind it.
Our ambition is to compete with projects backed by large corporations and
proprietary solutions and we cannot do that without you. Become a supporter
today!
How much should I give?
Donations range from single digits donations to hundreds. For us it is important
to give something back to help this project to succeed. If you want to help,
please do so and encourage others to do so, too.
Maybe we will also have a small FAQ depending if people have some difficulties
to donate or commonly asked questions.
There should also be some area for the smallprint since we need to tell people
who they are donating to and that we don't do any refunds, etc.
@Maurice: Could you design a page like this?
@Sven: Would you be up to implement his with the JS and all other frontend bits?
I would develop the backend and the interfaces with the payment providers.
Best,
-Michael
