How to Make Donations Work

Donations - I'm sure you have either tried asking for them, know someone who has, or have come across a blog or site with a prominent "donate now" button on it somewhere. It could be a donation of any form such as the Chipin widget, the Buy Me a Beer plugin, or a simple Paypal button. Believe it or not, donations can actually work.

I guarantee it can be frustrating. After all, you've created the most outstanding blog or website in your chosen niche. You've jam pack loaded it with incredible one of a kind content that can't be found anywhere else, and it is starting to generate a decent amount of traffic. Comments are routinely left that are positive, praising you for your efforts and more importantly praising you for sharing your insights for free.

It's about this point that you suddenly realize you could have been selling this content all along and making a nice profit, but instead you've locked yourself into a situation where you stand to lose your readers if you cut off their access and start charging for it.

Your site is where it is at because you've been generous, open, and giving, and charging for your content or special articles, even in your mind, is not really a viable option.

I have a solution for you and it is what I did on my site to make donations work. Give begging a chance. My main site, How to Box, is proof of it. But, you have to be willing to give as much as you take. Let me explain.

I'm not saying, flat out ask for money. I've tried that elsewhere and I've seen it elsewhere and not only does it make your site or blog seem cheap (in my opinion), but it has a bit of a deflating effect on your own psyche (thoughts like "I can't believe I'm begging...") Just plopping a Paypal donate now button on your site isn't enough. There has to be some incentive for your user to use it. By changing your perception of what a donation actually is, then you have a monetization strategy that works.

If you have enough of the following characteristics in place, your blog or site might be a candidate for donations:

• A loyal userbase
• A decent amount of traffic
• Flagship content (thanks to Chris Garrett)
• Some kind of interactivity between yourself and your readers (comments, privatemessages or whatever)
• Your readers have to trust you - at least a little bit.

Once you have a couple or all of these characteristics, then you can implement my donation strategy which consists of:

1. Creating at least two levels of users - regular and premium

2. Taking your flagship content and giving unrestricted access to your premium user.

3. Making it incredibly easy and completely unrestrictive for your regular users to become premium users.

The key to this lies in point 3. Otherwise, the donation is simply a payment under the guise of a donation. There is a fine distinction here that I'm sure we could argue over many beers and still not sway one another's minds. Hopefully I can make this clear.

A donation is a donation if a person willingly gives you money. You can argue that it is money given with no expectation of return, however, I'd argue that that person either already has received something (an excellent site or blog), or will receive it (premium status) after giving you the money. The most important thing is that you can not restrict any user, money or not, from easily obtaining premium if they don't want to donate. This is what still makes it a donation and not a payment. Regardless of whether they make the donation or not, you have to be willing to upgrade their account and continue to give away your excellent flagship content if they ask, although I'll show you how to minimize this in a minute. Thus, like I said above, you have to be willing to give as much as you take.

I found that there was a wide demographic of my users that either:

1. Could not afford to pay for my product
2. Were skeptical of paying for my product
3. Had no physical means of paying for my product (no Paypal, no credit card, etc...)

As well, I created the site with full intention of never making any money off of it. I actually did it to make a difference (as noble and full of crap as that sounds.) To this day, my primary purpose is not to line my pockets, but to make it grow, prosper, and help the people using it learn how to box and get in incredible shape. Thus, any money that comes in is just "gravy".

So, when costs finally started pissing off my wife, I tried this "donation" method of selling. My training programs are only accessible to premium users and I allow my users to pay me whatever they can afford to get them. Not only does it relieve them of any risk, but it actually surprised me at just how generous total strangers can be.

Do I get taken advantage of? Absolutely. I routinely have people donate $.50 or $.25 just to get access, but I also know that some of those lowball donations are people just testing me out. Seeing if what they are getting is any good and then some of them come back and donate again with something more substantial. All in all, the number of really lowball donations is extremely low (<2%).

In the end, it doesn't matter, because if someone emails me their sob story about how they can't afford to pay, yadda yadda yadda, I quickly respond with "I've upgraded your site, enjoy" and they lay on the praise and adoration which not only helps my ego, but I know is being spread to their friends. Friends who have money and are willing to part with it.

For the most part, though, I believe people are honest and when they like the site, they pay well for the training programs.

(I'm currently experimenting with a couple of things to increase the initial donation amount and will report back if they work.)

My site now makes more in donations than it does from all other advertising on it (affiliate and adsense) combined and has increased every month since I implemented it. It required tweaking though as I started like so many others and just put a "donate now" button up and hoped for the best. Turns out visitors need an incentive to donate because:

They are too damn lazy to actually make a donation no matter how much they like your blog or site.

Before I sum up, I have two more things to say. First, donations doubled when I made the process a one click, automated upgrade path. That is, users simply put a number in a box and hit donate and it is done. Paypal does the rest. Their account is automatically upgraded and they have full access. The more clicks in the process, the more chance laziness has of taking over before the money hits your account.

Second, I turn those that can't afford to donate into dollars as well through the use of an advertising program allowing incentive clicks (Maxbounty - that's my affiliate link, hope you don't mind:). Before I grant them access, I ask them to choose an option that pays me for their lead. I'll expand on this in another blog post if anyone is interested. If that still is not an option for them, then I upgrade their account anyways. Again, this goes back to laziness. It takes effort to write an email. Give them a different option and they almost always take it.

I know I said that I'd sum up and this is already way too long, but I figured you might be interested in the technical side. I'm running Drupal and use the following modules to make this magic happen:

1. role signup
2. lm_paypal with a slight modification
3. tac_access lite

That's it. It really is a simple process.

I really hope this helps someone out there. Now feel free to debate whether or not it truly is a donation or just some convoluted method of convincing myself I'm not begging. Cheers.