New Initiative for Donations

[Mike Parker]

I have put out a few times that we want to start launching 
targeted fundraising campaigns. Head over to the donate page and 
you'll notice a new option.

https://dlang.org/foundation/donate.html

Flipcause provide a service aimed at assisting non-profits with 
fundraising. That's their core service anyway. There are other 
features built around it.

Part of that service includes targeted campaigns of the nature we 
want to start pushing, as well as the resources to create 
accompanying banners and other images. They also support 
peer-to-peer fundraising (which I hope to make use of in the 
future), ticket sales for events like DConf, online stores, and 
more.

The tile you see on the donate page is itself a campaign, a 
general fund campaign that I will keep open permanently. I'll 
soon be launching targeted campaigns that you can choose to 
support.

It's not a free service, obviously. We're currently on a free 
trial, but the Foundation will ultimately be paying $150/month. 
That's a significant investment and one that turned me off from 
evaluating the service when they first contacted the Foundation 
earlier this year. However, after evaluating their total package 
and some of the services they have in planning, it seems likely 
that the Foundation can stretch donated dollars farther in the 
long run than is possible now across the services currently in 
use. For example, with Open Collective we're paying 10% plus a 
2-3% transaction fee per donation). Flipcause of course has 
credit card transaction fees, but they allow donors the option of 
covering it and further provide a guaranteed minimum for us such 
that if not enough donors cover the fees to meet the minimum 
total from all donations in a given period, they'll refund us the 
difference.

In order to see that benefit, we'll need for a majority of our 
donations to come in through Flipcause. The other options aren't 
going away, but if you are considering a new donation to the D 
Language Foundation, choosing to send it through Flipcause will 
be a bigger help right now.

So I encourage all potential donors to please consider the 
Flipcause option, even if you've donated through one of the other 
options in the past. And yes, if you donate through Flipcause you 
can still get the benefits listed in the descriptions of the 
donor levels on our Open Collective page:

https://opencollective.com/dlang

And the direct link to the general fund campaign:

https://www.flipcause.com/secure/cause_pdetails/NDMzMzE=