[software] Design Decisions

[Dave Rolsky]

On Fri, 31 Oct 2008, Jim Brandt wrote:

>> Of course, ideally this would be tied into your CRM as well so you could
>> get intelligence of what projects each donor supports. Of course, this
>> could also be recorded separately, by allowing the CRM to split a single
>> donation across multiple funds.
>
> And having a page in the donor's profile that shows "you donated this and it 
> paid for this" is a good strategy to get more donations. People like to know 
> what their money paid for.

As I said before, my organization's donors don't seem to ask this 
question. I think it's a little different for us, because unlike TPF, we 
are not primarily organized to fund specific activities by other people.

Most of our work is education and outreach on a specific issue. We don't 
really pay people for specific activities, and activities are not our 
primary cost. Our biggest cost is staff. We pay one person to work almost 
full time coordinating volunteers and campaigns. It would be very hard to 
tie a donation to a specific event.

A lot of our work is done at (apparently) zero cost. For example, we do a 
lot of leafleting, where we organize volunteers to go hand out leaflets on 
animal agriculture at universities, concerts, etc. Nobody is being paid to 
do this, and we get the leaflets for free. A small amount of staff time 
may be spent helping organize this, but it'd be really hard to assign a 
cost to it.

Our donors are motivated because they support our _cause_ and our approach 
to activism. I'm sure they like specific things we do, but they probably 
also realize that they're not really paying for them directly.

Compare this to TPF, where donors are likely to look more carefully at 
exactly how TPF uses its money, because it spends a lot of money on 
specific projects. I think in this case donors are more likely to be 
motivated by specific projects rather than a general love of Perl (though 
that plays a part as well).

I guess what this highlights is that there really are a variety of 
different operating and funding models for 501c3 organizations. Currently, 
I'm most interested in activist/issue groups.

I think we have several other types of groups represented here, and 
there's even more out there not represented here, like organizations that 
exist primarily to provide services (my father's adoption agency might be 
a good example of that).


-dave

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