Provide marketing assistance for those raising money

[balupton]

Ideally, I would like a full-time income to come from Gittip. There seems to be a few steps to that:

1. Create amazing stuff
2. Expose that amazing stuff to as many people as possible
3. Inspire the people to donate via gittip to continue to fund development of amazing stuff

Gittip currently provides the technology to enable that, but it doesn't help that much with the workflow there. It would be great if there were videos, resources, walkthroughs, guides, tutorials, blogs, interviews etc from prominent people in the open-source community who are able to train people in accomplishing those 3 steps. As only one of those 3 steps needs to be lacking for the entire system to fallover. So the importance of making sure that all three of these things are catered towards, encouraged, facilitated, and fostered could not be stressed enough it seems.

I'd happily help on this, and document my journey as it goes. Any advice on this would be amazing, happy to gain feedback and help others on their journey too, making as much of it public as I possibly can.

I've experimented with such a thing before in my younger years and would be happy to kick such an approach up again with new learnings and others wanting to do the same.

[balupton]

The possible end goal of this could be: Be able to routinely create 12 months of full-time income for themselves using gittip

To accomplish this via this issue, possible ways could be:

1. Provide support groups as much as possible
2. Provide resources as much as possible
3. Open-source as much as possible

[chadwhitacre]

I would see us addressing this on the /about/creators/ (#1233) and/or /about/getting-money/ pages (#1234). Does that sound right, @balupton?

In general you're right, the process is to create amazing stuff, spread the word, and inspire people to give back. I think it would be most powerful to have people like yourself exploring this territory and leading the discussion. Do you think this is something that should be centralized with Gittip?

[freakboy3742]

This is possibly an orthogonal point, but there's an interesting design choice (at, I least I assume it's been a conscious choice -- it might be an accident) that would seem to hinder, doing the sort of thing you're describing:

I have no way of identifying who my patrons are.

I am currently the recipient of $6 per week. I'd like that to be a whole lot more. As it stands, all I can do is to just keep doing whatever it is I'm doing, and occasionally "rattle the tin" to ask for more tips. My marketing is limited to doing stuff, and hope that my tip audience likes it. I can't survey my tip audience to find out what they like (or don't). I cant find out why I've been tipped instead of someone else. If I do something to offend someone, the first thing I'll know about it is when my tips go down... and I won't know who left, or why. I can't even say thank you an individual who is tipping me -- beyond using a broadcasting mechanism (like Twitter) "thanks to all my gittippers".

It seems to me that an important part of addressing point 3 in your list -- insipration -- is to give donors the clear impression that their donation really matters, and to engage with donors on an individual basis.

I appreciate that this is, in itself, a big philosophical can of worms -- anonymity has it's own benefits to the tipping process -- but I thought it was worth pointing out as a flaw (or, at least, a complication) in the grand scheme.

[tshepang]

@freakboy3742 someone stopping tipping should not be a big issue, given that they didn't give you $100/week. Anyways, the idea of gittip is to have people giving you because you rock in general. That, combined with the amounts being generally small, likely implies tippers quitting on you will be a rare thing.

You don't want to get to a point where you are trying to appease someone as a direct result of them tipping you. Might as well find a job/contract. I don't see a flaw anywhere here.

[yoshitamagoshi]

Hey all, new to Gittip but we do a lot of open source work at Myplanet and Benjamin's been pushing us to do more with Gittip.

What if we flipped the Gittip model on it's head and had funders able to identify key contributions they'd like to see made and crowdsource the building of those ideas. i.e. we'll put $500 down to see DocPad do X, Y, Z. Kind of a bounty system.

[chadwhitacre]

@yrassoulli Thanks for chiming in! :-) Gittip is about no-strings-attached gifts, so it doesn't really fit to add the bounty model to Gittip itself. Our plan instead is to partner with others who are implementing the bounty model. For example, you can connect your Bountysource account to your Gittip account right now. Also Catincan is running this cross-promotion.

[chadwhitacre]

@yrassoulli For more backstory see #214.

[yoshitamagoshi]

@whit537 makes sense, thanks for the insight.

[freakboy3742]

To be clear - my comments aren't about changing Gittip into a "strings-attached" gifting tool. My point is that "tips" in the real world aren't completely anonymous, and that's an important part of the tipping process.

If you're tipping your waitperson, you can complement them, and they have a chance to say thank you directly to you face. The waitperson has an opportunity to see their customer, and judge if they're doing the right thing.

If you look at a street musician/artist -- they can see what activities generate the most money in the hat, say thank you to anyone who does tip, and change their act if tips aren't coming in fast enough. If someone offers a particularly big tip, they might do something special just for that person -- not 'fee for service', but a customized thank you to give the gifter the feeling that their gift really meant something special.

It's this "customer interaction" that is missing from gittip. Anyone who has tried to raise money for a cause tell you that a key part of getting repeat donations is instilling a feeling of personal engagement, and a sense that "your donation matters". It's very difficult to do this when the donation process is completely anonymous.

[chadwhitacre]

I'm keeping this open in a tab and I'm stewing on this. I don't have any flashes of insight at the moment but I'm listening and thinking.

[mvdkleijn]

Personally what I like about gittip is that you don't forget devs... or rather don't exclude us. The problem I'm having with the likes of centup, flattr and patreon is that they all focus on ’content’. That's fine for bloggers and youtubers but what's ’content’ for a developer? The finished software? Fixed bugs? Some blog post about my software? But I'm rambling.

My point is that I do what I do because I think it's fun. Marketing is something I don't like, but is unfortunately necessary to get people's attention. So what I'd like gittip to help us out with is getting that attention so I can, mostly, concentrate on my main purpose of developing.

Hope that makes sense...

[tshepang]

That makes sense @mvdkleijn. That's what makes this particular Issue worthy. Another one is the recent Team feature, where one can donate cash to a project, and the money gets distributed to a few people. No need to do own marketing there if the project has visibility (and perhaps a marketing team of its own).

[mvdkleijn]

@tshepang Some "teams" are single individuals with little to no time to do marketing because they're spending it on working for a living and developing, yet equally deserving of gittips. :smile:

But you're right, if you have a team that's large enough to do some marketing that eases things.

Gittip should always stick up for the small guy. The big teams (like Apache et all) already have plenty options to generate income.

[DjebbZ]

Just feeding the discussion : did you read this recent essay by Isaacs ? https://medium.com/open-source-life/d44a1953749c

[chadwhitacre]

@DjebbZ Yup, thanks for linking it here. I added that to the "Building Gittip" collection on Medium, actually:

https://medium.com/building-gittip/

[balupton]

I was at a "Make More Money" seminar the past two days, and it was all about "join our business, sell our stuff, make more money". It turned out that I wasn't the only one who thought that it wasn't the way forward, however it did seem I was the only one there who was aware of the going open movement. I've done up https://github.com/bevry/goopen as a way we can work together to help bring awareness and remove the FUD that those outside our open-source bubble have.

While it isn't marketing assistance for individuals, it is marketing assistance for the movement, which should help.

[chadwhitacre]

I see this manifesting as a doc under /about/.

[chadwhitacre]

+1 from @dsernst in private text message:

One of the things that I think could be really helpful for new users is a "Tips for getting tips" guide.

[chadwhitacre]

+1 IRC

[chadwhitacre]

With the relaunch as Gratipay 2.0 and the new focus on Teams, I think we now fall more directly under regular ol' business marketing advice. Let's point people to a few resources such as Traction on the payments FAQ. What are a few other resources we could list?