What profwhat said.
For example, if membership costs $10, and 50 TnTers want to sign up with their real names and addresses, that's $500. If membership is $100, I'm not sure you'd get 50 TnTers. If you made this a "special" non-voting membership where folks don't have to say who they are, you might get a few more.
One method that I see is very popular on other sites is to sell badges - bronze, silver, gold for various donation levels, and these cute little icons appear every time that person posts. It's not membership, but it is a de facto kind of club, and would probably garner more cash than tying donations to a membership purchase.
As long as we keep our focus as an educational non-profit, a little bit of work by a couple of dedicated board members or other TnT denizens would net some serious cash through foundations. Probably not $4M, but certainly in 5 figures.
For example, if membership costs $10, and 50 TnTers want to sign up with their real names and addresses, that's $500. If membership is $100, I'm not sure you'd get 50 TnTers. If you made this a "special" non-voting membership where folks don't have to say who they are, you might get a few more.
Which, if there were no dollar amounts between $10 and $100, and we never expand our user pool above 500 users, is an excellent argument against a dues paying membership.
Here is what I envision, a $50 yearly membership, 10,000+ users, 500-1000 members. That's 25-50k a year we could plow into development, design, marketing, server hardware, content, etc... We've got a long way to go to get there, but we can start with the money current users are willing to part with, and use it to find/attract more users/members. Voluntary contributions just won't be enough. People need something in return. Membership gives them some level of control over how the funds are spent, and it gets them involved in the governance of TnT.
Also, why are you acting as if membership dues are somehow mutually exclusive with all other sources of funding? We can have membership dues, voluntary contributions, and apply for grants. What exactly is wrong with another source of funding?
Hey josh, I just pulled some numbers out of the air as an example, looking at two extremes, even though I think both numbers are realistic. If we went $50 per year, we might get, what, 50 members to start? 100? Is that a realistic target? Not bad if it is. But it's a drop in the bucket to what could be done with fundraising as a primary objective, mainly because we wouldn't be focusing on membership! 8^)
I'm not sure how you would use member cash to attract new members, but I'm really interested in finding out.
The thing about donations is that most people really don't need anything in return, other than knowing that they're helping keep TnT up and running, so membership really isn't the draw that you seem to think it is.
Once we grow, it'll be a different story. One community I belong to asks $18 a year after being free for years, and they have over 1,000 people contributing each year. No one except the site owner has a say in how things work there, btw. If you don't pay your annual membership fee, you're put on read-only status for most but not all of the site. I'm not saying we do that - in fact I think that's contrary to our purpose - but I'm just explaining how one site works, and does so fairly successfully with membership-driven fundraising. But they rely on other funding, too.
The question we need to ask , and we agreed to ask, is why we need more voting members than we already have. There are many reasons for having more members, as well as a couple of arguments against. But as I said earlier, we really need to test our reasons to make sure we're properly focused.
Of course, that doesn't mean that, for example, membership primarily focused on community representation (Rich's thought) couldn't include a fund-raising element. But if that's the case, I would argue that representation being the primary focus of membership, we should allow people to be members even if they cannot pay "dues", and that we shouldn't look at money collected from dues as a primary fundraising effort.
So there's nothing wrong with different sources of funding. The problem is that with such a small group of active members (that is, organizationally active), we really need to focus.
