Re: Friends of Eclipse

[Stormy Peters <stormy gnome org>]

On Mon, Dec 14, 2009 at 2:30 AM, Dave Neary <dneary gnome org> wrote:

Hi,

Stormy Peters wrote:
> Interesting thoughts and data on the Eclipse fundraising program:
> http://ianskerrett.wordpress.com/2009/12/10/a-successful-open-source-fundraising-campaign/

It raises an interesting question - how much does the FoG campaign net?
How much has it cost us in gifts & postage for that $26K? Do you think
the gifts help pull people up to the next donor level, or is someone who
wants to give 50 dollars give 50 dollars?

We have paypal fees, gift costs and postage. I haven't run the numbers recently but we could do it for 2009 at the end of the year. (The gifts are optional and some donors do choose not to receive them.)
 

Another interesting thing for me is whether the levels are a net benefit
or deficit to us - if we had a $100 button, would we get more than half
the people who click at $50 upgrading? We'd undoubtedly get some of the
$50 people jumping to $100 when they wouldn't go to $250, but when do we
hit the paradox of choice, where the number of donors will go down if we
have too many levels to choose from?

We have two pieces of data:
1) Many people give $25.
2) $25 is the minimum you can give and get a gift.

And some anecdotal data:
1) A handful of people have told me they would give $50 (instead of $25) if it was the minimum.

So we could experiment. An easy first experiment would be to change the Associate level to $50-500. I'm for that. What do others think?

Stormy