Many small to medium-sized open source projects depend on user donations for their primary source of funding. Proper design of the funding webpage can have an outsized impact on whether your projects' end users decide to support your project financially. Additionally, projects can easily pitch the funding ask too strenuously or not enough, leading to end user alienation and disengagement.
Learn how to design an effective funding webpage that helps to grow your community and supports the long term viability of your project.
Talking about donations is slightly taboo in the FLOSS world. But the biggest secret is that people who donate money are one of your projects' largest assets because their contribution links them tightly to your project's community (coders, writers, artists, translators, end-users and other people who donate). By running an effective donation program, you are growing your community and strengthening the long term resilience of your project.
Even if your project doesn't need the funding directly, building a funding program will build your project in other ways. Funding contributed to your project is ideally contributed upstream to your supporting libraries. This process links multiple members with open source contributions that they were not even aware were helping them. And this process starts with effective design.
This talk will cover
- Knowing the design consumer
- Where to place the donation page
- How to optimize the page for both engagement and ease of use
- Easy A/B testing without extra setup
- Building effective community with your donation page.
- Big red flags to avoid
Additionally, this talk will give specific, concrete examples and results from the design process of the KiCad EDA suite's donation program.
