Explore "pay what you like" cost recovery models

Context

One of the challenges that we've faced is in recovering our costs in a way that is accessible for communities that have fewer resources. If we recover our costs by charging a fee to communities, and if we charge the same flat rate for everybody, and if we want to pay team salaries that are roughly mapped to North American tech salaries, then we will be too costly for most communities outside of the wealthy nations of the world.

I recently had an interesting conversation with Erika Owens from the Open News project. She described a similar problem that cost-recovery system for their Open News conference. They wanted a way to price their tickets equitably so that the conference was accessible to a broad audience.

Their approach was to offer price tiers with the option to select whatever you want. It sounds like the model was very successful. For example, they used language like this:

When participants go to purchase their ticket, they see these instructions to select the tier that best reflects their situation:

$125: This is the base price for people who are paying their own way, from small news organizations with fewer than 50 people, or nonprofits with budgets $750,000 or less. $275: This tier is for people from medium-sized news organizations of 51-250 employees, nonprofits with budgets $750,000-$2 million, and other similar-sized organizations. $450: This ticket tier reflects very nearly the actual cost for each attendee of SRCCON 2021 and is for people from large news organizations with more than 250 employees, nonprofits with budgets over $2 million, and other organizations that provide full professional-development budgets for employees.

In our discussion, Erika mentioned that it was really important (and useful) that they:

Defined explicit tiers of prices, rather than telling people to pay whatever
Explained how the resources for each price would be used or how it would benefit the mission
Communicated how this system aligned with their goals and intended impact of creating an inclusive conference
You should lead with the option that you want the other person to take, and offer them other options if they don't want to take it

Proposal

We should explore organizations that have implemented a "pay what you can" model, and understand if something similar could be used for the communities that we serve. The service model is a bit different in that it is ongoing and has certain expectations of service levels, but if we can find a way to generate more resources from organizations that have more resources, and in a way that aligns with our mission and grows access to the service, then it could be impactful.

Updates and actions

No response

2i2c-org / team-compass