Some things I've learned:
- Ask for specific dollar amounts. It'll give users an idea of what they should type in. - Make that donation link more prominent on the page. The "this PayPal link" <a> tag is pretty hidden at the bottom. - Offer incentives. I give my donors a trophy for their site account when they give something, and there are certain tiers (e.g. gold trophy for $50, silver for $25, etc.) Requires a bit of management on your side of things, but it could pay off.
Yep. I was at a museum and they had "please donate €5" donation box, which was full of fivers. Otherwise it'd be full of coins.
Heck, I just saw donations can be recurring, so let's do that instead. If you made this a bit more prominent, I'm sure quite a few people would love to chip in.
> On the subscription payment idea, even if 10% of the userbase started paying a few bucks a month for extra Pro-level features, we’d still be coming up thousands of dollars short each month.
We aren't formally doing any fundraising at this point -- that's an account we've had set up for ever mostly for the once-a-month "hey, here's five bucks, buy yourself a beer" tip from a random happy/guilty user -- but if you toss money in that, it ends up with us, and I won't tell you no.
If you want to be extra sure about the paypal link, visit the one at the bottom of Metafilter's about page, here:
http://www.metafilter.com/about.mefi