Donations (community input encouraged)

Donations (community input encouraged)

bart's picture

The donations block needs work. :)

At the moment, we don't have any actual PayPal integration, which means that each donation has to be entered manually by me, and then I have to update the donations block.  This is fine, but it's prone to error (math errors, missing donation notifications from paypal, me being off on vacation or something and not being around to update the Donations block at an appropriate time).

Here's what I'd like to do with it:

  • Figure out how to record donations automatically so the donations block can be updated in realtime, without any intervention on my part.
  • Update the "Donation record" page in realtime as well
  • Remove the "How was it used?" field from the Donation Record.  At this point, if I commission two works at the same time, who's to say which donation was spent on commission A and which was spent on commission B?  That said, where the money is spent is still important, so I'm going to...
  • Add an Expenditure Record page that tracks money spent on commissions, server maintenance, etc.
  • Automatically award a "Site Supporter" medal to donors
  • I'm considering the possibility of holding "donation drives", where I price a large commission ($1000+) from an artist and then buy the commission once we reach that amount.  In these cases, people can specify whether they want their donation to be for the donation drive or for our normal commissions.

I've mentioned this in the past, but it bears repeating:  At no point will donations ever give anyone special access to the site.  All donations will always be spent on commissions, unless someone specifically asks they be used to cover server costs.  This won't change with OGA 2.0.

Anyway, if you have any thoughts, please post them here.  Be aware, though, that exchanging money tends to be a delicate topic, so I need to be very conservative in terms of how donations are dealt with, even if it means decereasing the overall amount that we bring in.

Bart