KDE is getting a much more user-friendly fundraising platform, and it’s a big deal!
Currently our small-donor donation page is https://kde.org/community/donations, which lets you make a single one-time donation. To make a recurring donation, you have to visit https://relate.kde.org, which is less user-friendly, and it’s always struck me as odd to have these split up in two locations.
Well, KDE is getting a much better donation system powered by Donorbox, which I hope will turbocharge our fundraising! It’s very user-friendly and allows you to easily make recurring donations, which is important. We already set this up for the Kdenlive fundraiser, and it was a smash hit, raising 100% of the funds in the first month of the 3-month campaign. That fundraiser has since moved into stretch goals!
We’ve now done it again, rolling out a Donorbox-powered donation UI on https://kde.org/bluefriday, our tongue-in-cheek anti-black-friday fundraiser, which will become a general end-of-year campaign. This work was done by members of KDE’s promo team and fundraising working group, principally Lays Rodrigues, Carl Schwan, and Paul Brown. And so far the response has been huge! The fundraiser opened yesterday, and at the time of publication, it’s already collected 530€ from 28 generous donors! And after the new year, the current plan is to continue to use the Donorbox-powered UI for all small donations.
This really goes to show how important user-friendliness is. When you make it easy for people to give you money… they give you more money! Thank you so much, everyone.
Why is all this money stuff so important? Well, it’s how the KDE e.V. pays for hiring (such as for the Platform Software Engineer position I blogged about two days ago), development sprints, conferences, infrastructure, and similar activities that help KDE thrive and grow. If we’re gonna hugely expand technical employment–which is a major goal of mine–then we’re gonna need a lot more recurring donations to do it.
So what are you waiting for? Head over to https://kde.org/bluefriday and make a donation today. If it’s a recurring donation, we’ll love you forever! 🥰
Adventures in Linux and KDE 
Finally! I setup a recurring task previously to donate but noticed that KDE have also github sponsorship so I ended up switching there… Glad that you’ve sorted this out!
LikeLiked by 1 person
FWIW the GitHub sponsorship program ends up costing the KDE e.V a significant amount in taxes compared to the new Donorbox-based system, so your money would go farther if you switch!
LikeLike
@Nate
switched from GH to donorbox. Would be nice if the “donate” link would point directly to donorbox. Second thing – I used PP, but if someone uses card there is no obvious way to check the donation status / cancel it while navigating kde.org. What’s more, donorbox confirmation email is… in German (“Sie können sich in…”) Which I’d say need some polish. Last, but not least – being able to choose currency (USD or EUR) would be nice as well. I’m aware that KDE is registered in EU / Germany, so it operates in EUR, but having it more transparent for the user and handling currency conversion on your end would _feel_ nicer 🙂
LikeLiked by 2 people
Those are valuable observations, thanks. I’ll forward them onto the fundraising folks.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Agree that relate.kde.org isn’t user-friendly at all and broken. My paypal account was debited but nothing shows up on the dashboard and I even received a renewal reminder by email. Things are odd but, well, money was transferred and I don’t care about the details.
Should I switch to the new Donorbox system though?
LikeLike
Please feel free to, yeah! It’s the future.
LikeLike
The KDE donation system was definitely a bit user-unfriendly, but this helps a lot! It was really straightforward, this is awesome stuff!
LikeLiked by 2 people
Nice!
Donated a small but monthly amount, I hope I’ll be able to donate more in the future.
LikeLiked by 1 person