Not sure how I got added to this, but my two cents as a father of 4, working full time, this seems like a "lot". Filemaker is about 5% of my day job and while I love what's going on here and appreciate all the work, I don't have bandwidth for voting or membership.
I'm going to share my (busy) thoughts and then remove myself from the thread. If there's something specific and non-committee I can do to help, feel free to DM me. I hope I'm not being rude, ya'll seem great, but two sick parents, 4 kids, and a full time job doesn't leave me much headroom these days... as a point of perspective there are probably others like me.
My thoughts:
Make it easy to donate money. Someone mentioned a periodic reminder (one month out of the year put up a banner).
Subscription sounds like SO MUCH overhead. Heck I could bag groceries at the grocery store for 3 hours and pay the same amount you'll get from that, why would 10 people spend a few hours each talking about and then implementing a subscription and then make all the users spend more time for pennies?
Is this site valuable? I think it is.. just reach out and say "Give us $50 for two months of hosting" and I'd say OK as long as I don't have to be on a committee. It's an easy ask if it's a non-profit.
that being said I'm pretty sure someone already said they'd happily pay, and the response is you didn't want to ask them. That's silly. People WANT to help, and if someone made decent money this year and is happy to chip in, just accept it. Instead of asking someone for something they don't mind giving it seems like you're taking up mindshare of a dozen people and putting a system in place to ensure that every user has more complexity trying to get to information they need. It just all feels super overbuilt for such a small amount of money, assuming we're just talking about hosting here.
Even better, reach out to 10 Filemaker development shops and say "hey, we have some top Filemaker talent here, if you're looking for project OR looking for talent you can sponsor us for a year for $500. That's chump change for any decent business, if they get ONE new employee out of it every two years, or ONE client every two years it's worth it. If they get one of each every year it's worth a LOT more than that.
Are there other expenses other than hosting? If so bundle them in. If it's hosting, can you piggyback of someone and trade that for sponsorship. I have a Siteground site for like $20 a month which I'm pretty sure could easily handle one more site like this. That being said I sold my business a few years ago and am now helping out at a local school with data systems so I'm probably not the best person to host it, but I'm SURE there's some Filemaker dev shop out there that has their own server, or bandwidth on the rented one, that could throw this site up for the price of sponsorship.
Again, apologies if I'm blunt. Busy and wanted to make sure to share this perspective. My two cents, take the money from the person who offered. Figure out how much money it is per year, and see if anyone on this thread would reach out to Claris and/or a couple of Filemaker shops to find someone to sign up for a two-year sponsorship.
If you still want donations, put a "donate to Girls Code" or something button on the corner of the site...
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@JasonMark, thank you for valuable input. We need perspective from many people from many countries and diverse situations of live and motivations.
Personally, I am learning a lot in this thread.
I agree with MonkeybreadSoftware: "Well, just make it kind of optional and with an incentive."
For simplicity, I think we should just rely on donations rather than individual subscriptions. And give back something immediately tangible in return, like a shirt or mug? I know we shouldn't NEED to do that, but I for one would be more inclined to provide financial support if it also included a bright shiny object
I agree with donations too. But I think fmsoup does NOT NEED to give back physical giveaways. For your donation you get a real value by the forum itself.
Do I donate for getting a little gift? Or do I want to support the forum? I think, in this forum most people are supporters. In my eyes this is the spirit of this forum.
There are some websites I support financially using Patreon. Many content creators set levels of support that will give addition perks like access to private forums or restricted downloads. I have no idea how big of a cut Patreon itself takes.
I would prefer that there was no compulsory, or set amount, but leave it completely voluntary. The more flexible it remains the more likely people are to donate. Being forced to do something often ends up with āan equal and oppositeā result. I donāt see there being a problem using a mailing list once or twice a year politely asking for donations. I believe there are people here who would be prepared to continue to contribute if it was necessary as we have been for the last year or so (how long has it been since you put this up as a proof of concept Cecile?).
Just of the record, this is what Wikipedia are doing at the moment (which I donāt necessarily suggest we do here)
@Markus
What do You mean with "in some way"? An E-mail with kind words and a written "Thank You"? Or do you vote for a physical giveaway? Or a handwritten postcard?
I donāt know if it is still the case today, but a few years ago when I contributed I got a contribution receipt that I could submit to the tax authorities. This was a good thing for me.
