But then you're spending hundreds of €$£ a month on stuff and need to go through a list of dozens of things to figure out which you should continue paying for.
So no. I will continue to donate randomly to stuff, and limit subscriptions to a handful I can mentally keep track of. I'm sorry.
PS: I like, and very much respect, how Kagi handles subscriptions. Not gonna work for donations, but I wish more services handled things that way.
> We would vastly prefer you donate $10/mo for one year ($120 total) than $200 in one lump sum. That’s counter-intuitive, so let me explain.
For a long time now I've wanted to build a donation subscription management service. A sort of "Set how much you want to donate a month and allocate it to charities of your choice". Tools to let you do %, flat $, "whatever isn't allocated, allocate to this charity", etc. And things like an easy way to re-route your giving to a crisis for a period of time (one-time, x-months, ongoing).
Most non-profits have really rough donation portals (UI/UX) and having to log into 5-10+ portals to manage your giving is annoying. Also, I think a number of people are overwhelmed by giving, as in they don't know where to start. Giving them an easy way to manage it in 1 place and protecting them from getting spammed (unless they opt-in to get "updates") seems like a win.
Why only for donations? What about for all subscription services?
For this I use privacy.com, to give each 'vendor' its own unique credit card number, with a monthly/annual/lifetime limit. I can review all my recent expenses and open cards, and close or pause them whenever I like. This system just caught an 8% price increase by my ISP, which meant it was rejected before I was charged, and I was able to call and negotiate it down (20%!).
Not affiliated with privacy.com, just a happy customer. I give up my credit card points on subscriptions, in exchange for peace of mind and finer-grained control over my finances.
Well, managing subscriptions for other services requires something like privacy.com (personally not for me, not saying it can't work for others but I'm not a fan of that style) whereas charitable donations can be "proxied" without needing (research needed) needing each organizations approval/integration.
I always imagined non-profits would be easier since they just want the money, they don't /need/ to know who gave it for purposes of providing services. Maybe they want it for records/marketing but some of that I'm not a fan of. Just because I gave/give you $5/mo you don't have a right to sell my info or spam me with other things. This service (that I'm imagining in my head) would not hand over more info than needed, giving you a firewall between you and the charity. Easy to give, easy to stop giving, no spam, no guilt trip, no selling of your info. At least that would be the goal.
The argument is totally sound for comparing lump sum versus regular donations, but if the option comes down to $200 lump sum vs nothing, the lump sum wins.
95% of my donations to various things are lump sums as I've proven prone to losing track of subscriptions, so it's good to retain the option (as GNOME has). It can also be a lot simpler to make one-off donations as a company for accounting reasons.
How can I donate to the KDE desktop project? Gnome's UI has no sense to it at all. Look at gedit, it has three menus including one hamburger menu. Just do a menu bar, people!
For my projects, I prefer to collect the money for the whole year operation in advance. This allows me not to refer to subscription model, yet not to ask for donations every month.
Now that's what I call an effective fundraising campaign. Indeed, small monthly donors feel more stable than large, one-off checks (even if, in theory, the latter is larger than the former.)
Same logic applies to all subscriptions.
This may look fine when it's one sub.
But then you're spending hundreds of €$£ a month on stuff and need to go through a list of dozens of things to figure out which you should continue paying for.
So no. I will continue to donate randomly to stuff, and limit subscriptions to a handful I can mentally keep track of. I'm sorry.
PS: I like, and very much respect, how Kagi handles subscriptions. Not gonna work for donations, but I wish more services handled things that way.
> We would vastly prefer you donate $10/mo for one year ($120 total) than $200 in one lump sum. That’s counter-intuitive, so let me explain.
For a long time now I've wanted to build a donation subscription management service. A sort of "Set how much you want to donate a month and allocate it to charities of your choice". Tools to let you do %, flat $, "whatever isn't allocated, allocate to this charity", etc. And things like an easy way to re-route your giving to a crisis for a period of time (one-time, x-months, ongoing).
Most non-profits have really rough donation portals (UI/UX) and having to log into 5-10+ portals to manage your giving is annoying. Also, I think a number of people are overwhelmed by giving, as in they don't know where to start. Giving them an easy way to manage it in 1 place and protecting them from getting spammed (unless they opt-in to get "updates") seems like a win.
Why only for donations? What about for all subscription services?
For this I use privacy.com, to give each 'vendor' its own unique credit card number, with a monthly/annual/lifetime limit. I can review all my recent expenses and open cards, and close or pause them whenever I like. This system just caught an 8% price increase by my ISP, which meant it was rejected before I was charged, and I was able to call and negotiate it down (20%!).
Not affiliated with privacy.com, just a happy customer. I give up my credit card points on subscriptions, in exchange for peace of mind and finer-grained control over my finances.
Well, managing subscriptions for other services requires something like privacy.com (personally not for me, not saying it can't work for others but I'm not a fan of that style) whereas charitable donations can be "proxied" without needing (research needed) needing each organizations approval/integration.
I always imagined non-profits would be easier since they just want the money, they don't /need/ to know who gave it for purposes of providing services. Maybe they want it for records/marketing but some of that I'm not a fan of. Just because I gave/give you $5/mo you don't have a right to sell my info or spam me with other things. This service (that I'm imagining in my head) would not hand over more info than needed, giving you a firewall between you and the charity. Easy to give, easy to stop giving, no spam, no guilt trip, no selling of your info. At least that would be the goal.
The argument is totally sound for comparing lump sum versus regular donations, but if the option comes down to $200 lump sum vs nothing, the lump sum wins.
95% of my donations to various things are lump sums as I've proven prone to losing track of subscriptions, so it's good to retain the option (as GNOME has). It can also be a lot simpler to make one-off donations as a company for accounting reasons.
How can I donate to the KDE desktop project? Gnome's UI has no sense to it at all. Look at gedit, it has three menus including one hamburger menu. Just do a menu bar, people!
KDE accepts donations. https://kde.org/donate/
For my projects, I prefer to collect the money for the whole year operation in advance. This allows me not to refer to subscription model, yet not to ask for donations every month.
Now that's what I call an effective fundraising campaign. Indeed, small monthly donors feel more stable than large, one-off checks (even if, in theory, the latter is larger than the former.)