User donations

I don't have a stronger enough member base for successful sponsorships. I've only ever had one donation and that was for 5$. Would you like to share any tips, tricks or advice which could help change this? 

Posted by: Lee

I once run a mental health community with close to 3000 members, which survived solely on user contributions. In fact we made enough money that I could buy enhancements and donate the left over to charity!

Do you have any success with user donations?

Was it a known fact that a portion of the donations would go to charity? I wonder if that helped draw in donations?

Also did the donations go to your personal account or did you have a special business account it went to?

We rely on Supporting Members to help maintain the Christian forum that I'm an Admin at and I've also given money to the site owner in small amounts as needed. I told my husband that the site is my hobby so the little bit of money I supply is like spending money on a hobby anyway  😀

It be really nice if my users gave me some money, but sadly I have a rather cheap userbase 😛

I've had donations on my forums for years, however, once my private server for PSO closed up shop due to lack of funds for it, donations completely ceased, they had dwindled out prior to closing but yeah. I feel nowadays a lot of people don't bother to donate to forums. Which is one of the reasons I moved over to Jcink's forum hosting, it's cheaper and much mroe affordable for me.

I've not really tried user donations until now.  I have a drum lesson forum and my goal is to get 1 percent, at least, to donate to my Patreon page.  Well, actually, I'm targeting the most obsessed drummers - because the most strange content (5/4 time, 7/4 time etc..) will be premium.  Anyway, I like this situation because I actually enjoy giving a lot away for free - and it;s a good marketing gimmick.

I never thought about possibly setting up a patreon. I might look into doing that in the future. 🙂 

I don't ask for donations. I have started selling premium membership and mentioned how it helps support the site. Premium membership gives you a bunch of perks, so you get a lot of useful stuff back and I try to make it work in a way regular forum members don't feel left out. 

I have never really asked for donations. When I had a really hard time some members actually voiced they would be willing to, and we discussed the possibility. Fortunately, we managed to pull through without needing to take from the members' pockets.

If I was to need donations I am not sure what I'd do. Maybe something like Patreon where I try to give a little bit back depending on how much they cooperate. I would keep it just for the project.

On sites I've ran I've never had success with pure donations as opposed to member upgrades (VIP and the like). It's something that I would've liked but the sites I ran probably didn't really fit with the niche of people that generally popped $5 into something out of the good of their heart lol. Member upgrades kept us going for a couple months from time to time so it wasn't all bad. To be fair I wouldn't even know where to get started with donations now a days, seems we need to be offering Kickstarter-esqe rewards to entice people to do so lol.

I've never sought donations previously, but with all of the add-ons and both styles I've purchased for this project I may just have some kind of donation link visible..

I won't expect anything, then if I do get a donation or two it'll be a nice surprise.

Posted by: Lee

I once run a mental health community with close to 3000 members, which survived solely on user contributions. In fact we made enough money that I could buy enhancements and donate the left over to charity!

Do you have any success with user donations?

Yes I run a forum with 2600+ members and they've as a whole, paid for everything from site upgrades to getting my car fixed! lol

No doubt that it will take a lot of FB followers - probably at least 10,000, to get any donations for my drum lesson thing.  I made this guess because two other Facebook pages seem to make money and have that many members (DrumsTheWord (around 10,000)  JohnXDrums (around 20,000)).

Damn, my FB page only has 64 followers/friend. lol  It is not related to my site, it's for cats & pets. hehe