Hi Otto,
* Otto Kekäläinen otto@fsfe.org [2009-12-18 23:51:03 +0200]:
- What is the difference between being a Supporter and a Fellow?
Don't answer me - I know the difference. Please rather reflect the contents of our website and think about why this is confusing to people. Specificly the donation page needs to be updated: http://www.fsfe.org/donate/donate.en.html
The new contribute page is very nice, but still it does not tell about the differences of becoming a Fellow or just a donator. http://www.fsfe.org/contribute/contribute.en.html
In discussions with Hugo, we had the idea to maybe get rid of "Make a donation" in contribute. But have another page directed to company donations.
Than add an easy possibility for our website visitors to make small one time donations.
I think that it will be clear than that a Fellow is someone who plan to support us a) not only with money but also stands behind our goals b) not only for a short time period -- like some months.
Additionally, it is confusing that as a Fellow you can choose how much (in €) to contribute - and a donator can do that too. Wouldn't we want everybody to become Fellows and contribute as much as possible rather than donators? Then the donation thing would be relevant only to companies and organisations.
Do you think this will also fix that problem?
Also one group of people is those who cannot afford the Fellowship fee - they could rather choose to donate a smaller sum. One can earn the status as a Fellow only if they are willing to donate 120€ or more yearly.
It is 60€ or more. 120€ is the suggested contribution for people who have a job. When you have a good job you could choose 240€. But those are just suggestions. Some fellows choose 80, or 90€. Some felt very generious and choose 600€ :)
For people who do a lot for Free Software, but cannot afford that they can apply for the Fellowship grant [1]. For people who just want to give us some money once, they can than use the one time donation feature.
A second option would also be to drop the high Fellowship fee and just maximize the number of Fellows we have to increase our political weight. In that case a separate donation possibility would be needed (and marketed).
There was a long discussion about that. We now agreed that for the next year we will not start that discussion again. But to focus on making it easier to donate. If someone cannot donate 60 EUR a year, we would rather like him to help us with his time (see other stuff on contribute). (And again, you can point them to the fellowship grant.)
At the moment I try to avoid the whole donation thing and recommend to individuals only the Join the Fellowship option.
Which is good, if they are dedicated to Free Software. With the proposed solution above, we might even be attract some one time donations because people liked the "WIWO declaration", a certain PR activity, or a good transcript.
Best wishes, Matthias
1. http://fellowship.fsfe.org/grant.en.html