Forum OpenACS Development: Re: RFC: Donationware Spec

7: Re: RFC: Donationware Spec (response to 1)

Posted by russ m on 07/25/03 09:34 AM

My point wasn't so much about being anonymous, but that every hurdle a user has to jump through between deciding "that's a good cause, I'll make a donation" and the money appearing in your bank account is another place where they may potentially decide it's all to hard and not complete the transaction.

Requiring someone to give you their email address and come up with a password is bad enough, but the case when someone comes back later to make another donation and has to recover their password in order to do it is likely to lead to zero repeat donations from anyone other than regular site users. This is surely not what you want.

I'd think that what you want to present to users is a "make a donation" or "donate to this campaign" button on the refering page, which takes them to a page where they optionally enter some personally identifying information (perhaps filled out for them if they're already regiistered and logged in), potentially select from a list of campaigns (with the correct one pre-selected if they clicked a "donate to this campaign" button), fill in their CC info and then click "donate"...

registrations are valuable, but surely money is more valuable...

8: Re: RFC: Donationware Spec (response to 7)

Posted by Malte Sussdorff on 07/25/03 09:55 AM

If a user wants to make a donation, he has to fill in a minimum amount of data. Name, address and CC card. This is information we can store. If we ask for an email (OPTIONAL) it should not be too much of a hassle for the user. Password will be send to his email address once he hits the donate buttom. Log him into the system, and set a cookie unless his email bounces :).

If the user returns and wants to make a new donation, he should be shown the values already filled in (name, address, amount, cc info), thanks to the cookie. Once the donation is made, he should recieve an email about it (again, if he supplied a valid email only).

As for anonymous donations. Is it legal? Or more precise, is it legal to accept them? Just wondering about a lot of skandals we had here with anonymous donations as this can be used for money laundring. If it is, make sure you support it, one way or another, though I personally would never like to forfeit my tax benefit that comes with donations :).

9: Re: RFC: Donationware Spec (response to 8)

Posted by Jarkko Laine on 07/25/03 10:28 AM

I'm not sure about the legality of anon. donations in different countries (that's why I asked it), but at least you can easily drop a few thousand bucks into Salvation Army pot without anyone coming to ask your ID or that are you trying to wash your money 😉

10: Why require site registration? (response to 7)

Posted by Steve Ivy on 07/25/03 06:08 PM

it is likely to lead to zero repeat donations from anyone other than regular site users. This is surely not what you want.

This is true. I'm trying to remember now why I designed the system to require membership, and having a hard time. I'll look at it again and see about changing it.

Ok, some of it is coming back to me: requiring site registration gave us a way to use the existing user table for donors, and extend on OACS's account management features (/pvt/home, etc) for allowing donors to view their donation history, etc. Otherwise I need to build and manage a seperate Donor table, as well as creating the "donor account" pages. Oh, and, um, providing a password scheme to protect them?

Anyway, if that's what I need to do then that's what I need to do, but that was the reasoning behind it.