[00:00.000 --> 00:12.080]  We started, and we went through a number of stages, like a lot of projects do.
[00:12.080 --> 00:18.960]  We started with a small donation we were trying to build up and get into a system where we
[00:18.960 --> 00:28.040]  could be self-sustaining because we wanted to actually have the ability to move faster.
[00:28.040 --> 00:33.760]  We wanted to build a better project for our community.
[00:33.760 --> 00:40.520]  The way we wanted to do that was we wanted to bring full-time developers into the project.
[00:40.520 --> 00:42.480]  As of 2022, we've been successful.
[00:42.480 --> 00:45.880]  We have two full-time developers working on the KeyCAD project.
[00:45.880 --> 00:50.920]  We have eight other core developers who are all contributing and hundreds of people around
[00:50.920 --> 00:57.440]  the world who we are able to successfully fund to help work on the project.
[00:57.440 --> 01:02.720]  Designers, documentation, librarians, all of the people that it takes to make a large
[01:02.720 --> 01:11.160]  open-source project work is sustained by our donations, by our community.
[01:11.160 --> 01:17.760]  I want to tell you a little bit about how this came to be because this wasn't obvious
[01:17.760 --> 01:23.400]  and it wasn't immediate and it wasn't just putting up a single page.
[01:23.400 --> 01:28.280]  Initially, our first donation page looked like this and you can see I've kind of squished
[01:28.280 --> 01:31.160]  it down so I could see the whole page.
[01:31.160 --> 01:36.000]  If you looked at it on your web browser, you would see the top little picture and you had
[01:36.000 --> 01:40.080]  to go all the way down to get to your donations.
[01:40.080 --> 01:51.320]  Quick, I would like someone in the room to donate 120 Swiss franc to the KeyCAD project.
[01:51.320 --> 01:57.760]  The question was for each user who went in there who didn't happen to use Swiss franc
[01:57.760 --> 02:03.240]  as their base currency, how much is going to show up on my credit card bill if I decide
[02:03.240 --> 02:04.840]  to support the project?
[02:04.840 --> 02:08.800]  How do I know that this is going to actually support the project?
[02:08.800 --> 02:19.080]  All of these initial pain points in our first generation of a donation page were there because
[02:19.080 --> 02:23.560]  we picked what was available, the projects that were supporting us.
[02:23.560 --> 02:29.800]  We were initially working through the CERN Open Society Foundation and they provided
[02:29.800 --> 02:33.480]  this, but they worked in Swiss francs because they're CERN.
[02:33.480 --> 02:36.960]  Our users, maybe not so much.
[02:36.960 --> 02:41.840]  We were initially seeing very few donations from this site.
[02:41.840 --> 02:44.360]  I'm going to tell you how we fixed it.
[02:44.360 --> 02:48.400]  Six ways or six steps.
[02:48.400 --> 02:52.880]  The first thing that we need to do is we need to identify who our users are because this
[02:52.880 --> 02:58.280]  drives every single choice we make in design, who is going to be the person who we're talking
[02:58.280 --> 02:59.280]  to.
[02:59.280 --> 03:07.320]  Then never interrupt the experience that your community has, your donors have because the
[03:07.320 --> 03:11.800]  moment that you interrupt their experience is the moment that they have better things
[03:11.800 --> 03:13.040]  to do.
[03:13.040 --> 03:16.040]  You always want to respect their time.
[03:16.040 --> 03:23.240]  Then shorten that click path, make sure that you're not setting yourself up for failure
[03:23.240 --> 03:28.600]  by putting intermediate steps that you don't have to have.
[03:28.600 --> 03:34.120]  Every time that you have to click on another link, you are going to lose more and more
[03:34.120 --> 03:39.920]  of your community before they get to that final point where they can actually come in
[03:39.920 --> 03:43.560]  to the larger community.
[03:43.560 --> 03:52.200]  It's in-house. There are a lot of places that will actually set up donations.
[03:52.200 --> 03:55.880]  I'm going to tell you, you need to do that yourself.
[03:55.880 --> 03:59.040]  Then test every single step.
[03:59.040 --> 04:08.640]  Finally, build your community because this is the basic raison d'être that we have as
[04:08.640 --> 04:14.280]  open source developers is we are a community. We're stronger as a community and this should
[04:14.280 --> 04:23.160]  be focused as the primary reason for each element in our donation.
[04:23.160 --> 04:26.640]  First, who is your customer?
[04:26.640 --> 04:31.800]  Who is the user base that you are trying to support?
[04:31.800 --> 04:34.120]  For KeyCAD, we were a bunch of engineers.
[04:34.120 --> 04:39.520]  We were a bunch of designers, circuit designers.
[04:39.520 --> 04:43.160]  Those were the professionals who were building those circuits.
[04:43.160 --> 04:48.120]  We're our audience.
[04:48.120 --> 04:53.680]  We needed to set up the system to reflect that.
[04:53.680 --> 05:03.800]  Your designers or your customers are also in this space who you're focusing on.
[05:03.800 --> 05:06.280]  It's not just what you do for a living.
[05:06.280 --> 05:10.080]  It's where you are in the world.
[05:10.080 --> 05:12.560]  What language do you speak natively?
[05:12.560 --> 05:14.440]  What are you most comfortable in?
[05:14.440 --> 05:20.640]  Once you can make your audience comfortable, your community more comfortable, then that
[05:20.640 --> 05:28.160]  is a time in which your community becomes stronger, becomes more tightly bound together.
[05:28.160 --> 05:35.280]  For us, we need to identify where we are. This is actual data.
[05:35.280 --> 05:41.840]  For KeyCAD, where do we see people coming into the project?
[05:41.840 --> 05:47.880]  We gather anonymized data that is sorted by country.
[05:47.880 --> 05:55.440]  The actual map here, our top five regions, the United States, Germany, France, Japan,
[05:55.440 --> 06:02.080]  and the UK. Notice Switzerland not in the top five.
[06:02.080 --> 06:03.960]  We were doing this wrong in the beginning.
[06:03.960 --> 06:06.840]  We were setting up a barrier in the beginning.
[06:06.840 --> 06:09.720]  We should be donating in euro.
[06:09.720 --> 06:12.560]  We should be donating in US dollar.
[06:12.560 --> 06:21.360]  We should be donating in yen and pound, but Swiss franc is maybe not the currency we should
[06:21.360 --> 06:22.720]  have chosen.
[06:22.720 --> 06:24.120]  We need to address this.
[06:24.120 --> 06:28.200]  The first step that we do is we try to address this.
[06:28.200 --> 06:31.240]  We joined in 2019.
[06:31.240 --> 06:34.800]  The Linux Foundation started a crowdfunding project.
[06:34.800 --> 06:40.840]  This was a way of bringing donations into open source projects.
[06:40.840 --> 06:44.560]  We joined this at the outset.
[06:44.560 --> 06:50.000]  Our primary reason, even though the Linux Foundation site is slow, even though they
[06:50.000 --> 06:55.920]  still have multiple clicks and they require way too much data to get you to allow you
[06:55.920 --> 07:03.640]  to donate, even with all of that, just changing from Swiss franc to US dollar donations met
[07:03.640 --> 07:06.240]  more of our community's needs.
[07:06.240 --> 07:12.280]  Our donations increased from about 10 per month to about 30 per month, which is good.
[07:12.280 --> 07:18.400]  It's a low increase because then we start to bring more people into our community.
[07:18.400 --> 07:22.920]  We need to do more, so we want to say, all right, what are the pain points still?
[07:22.920 --> 07:23.920]  Well, we're still slow.
[07:23.920 --> 07:25.440]  We're still requiring multiple clicks.
[07:25.440 --> 07:28.040]  I'm going to say, don't interrupt.
[07:28.040 --> 07:30.280]  Don't interrupt your donor's experience.
[07:30.280 --> 07:33.360]  I love GitHub sponsors.
[07:33.360 --> 07:34.800]  It's a wonderful program.
[07:34.800 --> 07:40.400]  If you're doing that, that's great, but you will never grow your community by putting
[07:40.400 --> 07:43.960]  the GitHub sponsors up there because the only people who are going to go up to the
[07:43.960 --> 07:48.320]  top of that page and find that button and click on that button are people who are already
[07:48.320 --> 07:56.600]  looking for it because no one goes to this page unless they want to download your software,
[07:56.600 --> 08:02.400]  unless they want to download their software, and the download is down here, and the sponsor
[08:02.400 --> 08:07.680]  is all the way up there, and so you have to go out of your way to find this.
[08:07.680 --> 08:15.520]  Going up this, for us, we identify, this is the KeyCAD website.
[08:15.520 --> 08:19.400]  We identify, why do you go to the KeyCAD website?
[08:19.400 --> 08:25.880]  You go to the KeyCAD website to get KeyCAD, to download KeyCAD, and so if we're respecting
[08:25.880 --> 08:32.680]  our community's time, we don't make them go out of their way to the donate button in
[08:32.680 --> 08:34.920]  the top right-hand corner.
[08:34.920 --> 08:41.600]  We start with making sure that they get to do what they came here to do first, which
[08:41.600 --> 08:43.640]  is download the software.
[08:43.640 --> 08:51.520]  Once you click on the download, instead of just showing a static page, we start the download,
[08:51.520 --> 08:57.120]  and while they're waiting, we give them the opportunity to donate because this means,
[08:57.120 --> 09:04.760]  this says, you are already accomplishing what you wanted to do, and we're going to
[09:04.760 --> 09:07.840]  give you this awesome software.
[09:07.840 --> 09:14.760]  Your software is awesome too, so that then becomes an opportunity while you're waiting.
[09:14.760 --> 09:24.160]  Maybe you also want to donate, and so this right here gave us an enormous increase because
[09:24.160 --> 09:31.360]  people were now willing to say, that's a good idea because I want this software to be better,
[09:31.360 --> 09:35.360]  I want to support this thing that I use, and our donations increase to 80 per month at
[09:35.360 --> 09:37.360]  this point.
[09:37.360 --> 09:44.360]  Now, part and parcel to this is shortening your click path because if you're respecting
[09:44.360 --> 09:51.800]  your community's time, you don't make them jump through hoops.
[09:51.800 --> 09:59.200]  Our initial page had nine to 12 clicks over four pages, and it went through postmates,
[09:59.200 --> 10:02.560]  and it was a mess.
[10:02.560 --> 10:09.440]  Our current page, every time we shortened it, we saw more people coming in, and so we're
[10:09.440 --> 10:12.560]  right now at one to two clicks over two pages.
[10:12.560 --> 10:20.200]  We'd like to get it even smaller, but that's where we're at right now because we have built
[10:20.200 --> 10:28.480]  this sub-site that we hold on our own.
[10:28.480 --> 10:36.400]  You can't shorten the click path if you don't own your own project's donation page because
[10:36.400 --> 10:46.240]  then you're at the mercy of whatever intermediary is going to be in between your community and
[10:46.240 --> 10:47.480]  you.
[10:47.480 --> 10:52.840]  We built this ourselves, and we put it behind a CDN, Content Delivery Network, because we
[10:52.840 --> 10:54.520]  want this fast.
[10:54.520 --> 10:59.880]  We want this to be directly at the user to the extent that we can.
[10:59.880 --> 11:07.600]  Right now, when you see this, all you need to do is, if you like the suggested donation,
[11:07.600 --> 11:08.600]  you click.
[11:08.600 --> 11:10.440]  It's one click.
[11:10.440 --> 11:14.400]  If you don't like the suggested donation, you can change it to whatever you want and
[11:14.400 --> 11:19.880]  then click through, so maybe two if you want to change it.
[11:19.880 --> 11:21.480]  We go through Stripe.
[11:21.480 --> 11:28.400]  We go through Stripe for the reason that we can pick how people are allowed to donate,
[11:28.400 --> 11:36.360]  so within China, for instance, where a large number of our users are, we can link into
[11:36.360 --> 11:39.680]  Alipay through Stripe.
[11:39.680 --> 11:46.400]  This allows our Chinese user base to integrate into our community better than they would
[11:46.400 --> 11:53.760]  be able to if we required credit cards, which are not common in China.
[11:53.760 --> 12:01.840]  Similarly, JiroPay in Europe, we link that in, SEPA payments.
[12:01.840 --> 12:08.400]  All of these things are accessible through Stripe, which is one of the reasons why we
[12:08.400 --> 12:11.200]  chose it, but there are other options as well.
[12:11.200 --> 12:15.680]  Then, we also added PayPal.
[12:15.680 --> 12:20.640]  People have different feelings about PayPal, and that's fine, but what I'm going to tell
[12:20.640 --> 12:31.920]  you is that if your community uses PayPal, then you should use PayPal because that is
[12:31.920 --> 12:37.760]  meeting them where they're at right now, so bringing your donations in-house.
[12:37.760 --> 12:45.120]  Internal are where you are controlling the information, and external, you need to get
[12:45.120 --> 12:49.000]  the information from someone else, and I'm going to tell you that internal is where you
[12:49.000 --> 12:53.440]  want to be because you get to make your own donation page, you get to make it as fast
[12:53.440 --> 12:59.360]  as you possibly can, and you get to control the individual steps.
[12:59.360 --> 13:08.800]  Every time that you make your users make your community wait to donate, every time you increase
[13:08.800 --> 13:15.640]  that load time by 100 milliseconds, you've lost 20% of people.
[13:15.640 --> 13:19.960]  They will go back, they'll click the back button, they'll go out and go somewhere else
[13:19.960 --> 13:24.320]  because you're not sure if it's loading or not.
[13:24.320 --> 13:26.760]  You get information when you bring it in.
[13:26.760 --> 13:35.400]  Bring this into your own organization because it allows you to connect with your community,
[13:35.400 --> 13:42.000]  and you get to every single donation should have a thank you from your project.
[13:42.000 --> 13:49.680]  You should never leave people out hanging saying, oh, I just sent this money into the
[13:49.680 --> 13:52.240]  ether, I hope it does something good.
[13:52.240 --> 13:53.640]  Send them a thank you.
[13:53.640 --> 13:57.920]  Send them a thank you because it lets them know that the community has received it, that
[13:57.920 --> 14:06.760]  they appreciate it, and you include in there a link into your forum, into your bug tracker,
[14:06.760 --> 14:11.560]  into the other ways that the community connects.
[14:11.560 --> 14:20.920]  This allows you to build these communities that bind all of us together more closely.
[14:20.920 --> 14:30.680]  Finally, test, real quick, A-B testing, piece of cake, never change everything outright.
[14:30.680 --> 14:33.440]  Never make a new donation page and get rid of your old one.
[14:33.440 --> 14:40.200]  You make donate 41, you want to change something, you make donate 42, and the only thing that
[14:40.200 --> 14:44.680]  you need to change is some simple little JavaScript.
[14:44.680 --> 14:50.680]  If math.random is less than 0.5, go to this one, otherwise go to that one.
[14:50.680 --> 14:56.480]  Two different pages, and each of them should have an embedded code in there, an embedded
[14:56.480 --> 15:00.480]  number that you get to send to Stripe.
[15:00.480 --> 15:06.080]  Because you're controlling your own donation pipeline now, so you get to send that to Stripe,
[15:06.080 --> 15:13.480]  you get to send that to PayPal so that when you do this, when you make a change, you get
[15:13.480 --> 15:22.200]  to look for your metrics, and you get to measure what the changes affect is, and whether you
[15:22.200 --> 15:29.080]  are trying to get people to join your mailing list because you want to announce releases
[15:29.080 --> 15:36.680]  or you want to get them to support the project or new users coming in, whatever it is, you
[15:36.680 --> 15:43.440]  are trying to change, you won't know if you've achieved it unless you're measuring it.
[15:43.440 --> 15:51.880]  So measure it in a way that respects people's privacy, measure it in a way that allows you
[15:51.880 --> 15:56.680]  to be the most effective you can in building your community.
[15:56.680 --> 16:04.840]  And finally, every donation is an opportunity to build your community because your donors
[16:04.840 --> 16:12.520]  are the most invested customers in your project, and you should treat them that way.
[16:12.520 --> 16:20.520]  You should bring them in because they saw fit to support you financially.
[16:20.520 --> 16:31.080]  They deserve to have that community wrap them in ways that are supportive and give them
[16:31.080 --> 16:35.880]  the opportunity to be part of the larger project.
[16:35.880 --> 16:41.040]  Every donor gets a thank you email, and then give them ways to deepen that connection,
[16:41.040 --> 16:49.880]  offer them things that are straightforward, so t-shirts for donation levels or badges
[16:49.880 --> 16:56.440]  on your user forum, all of these are ways to build that connection between your community
[16:56.440 --> 16:58.200]  and your project.
[16:58.200 --> 17:03.200]  And then directed donations give you more information about what your users are interested
[17:03.200 --> 17:04.200]  in.
[17:04.200 --> 17:12.160]  Finally, support your upstream because all of us stand on each other's shoulders.
[17:12.160 --> 17:18.640]  So when you are, whether you are a houseplant open source project just doing this for yourself
[17:18.640 --> 17:24.940]  or you're a big, large project, if you're receiving donations, pass that up because
[17:24.940 --> 17:31.680]  the things that allow you to build your project and allow all of us to do better are the things
[17:31.680 --> 17:34.800]  that we should be supporting ourselves.
[17:34.800 --> 17:38.600]  So last couple of tips.
[17:38.600 --> 17:40.480]  Be transparent.
[17:40.480 --> 17:48.280]  Show people how much processing charges are in the project and allow them to donate a
[17:48.280 --> 17:50.320]  specific amount to your project.
[17:50.320 --> 17:55.880]  You can add a small check box to round up to the donation amount.
[17:55.880 --> 18:01.000]  And always, always, always if you're doing your donation page, watch for fraud because
[18:01.000 --> 18:11.160]  there are a lot of bad actors who will automatically try to use your donation page to verify stolen
[18:11.160 --> 18:12.560]  credit card numbers.
[18:12.560 --> 18:17.600]  So when you do this, you watch out for this because it's not just an ethical responsibility,
[18:17.600 --> 18:22.200]  it's a financial responsibility to actually make sure that people are not being charged
[18:22.200 --> 18:25.160]  for things that they don't know.
[18:25.160 --> 18:32.760]  And so in this case, you can see this was all within one minute, this is actual attack
[18:32.760 --> 18:37.960]  on the KeyCAD donation website, it's like 30 donations per minute.
[18:37.960 --> 18:42.240]  They were just cycling through a bunch of credit cards.
[18:42.240 --> 18:47.320]  And we found the one that they work that they succeeded and we reported it as fraud and they
[18:47.320 --> 18:49.280]  stop after you do that for a little while.
[18:49.280 --> 18:51.400]  So thank you very much.
[18:51.400 --> 18:52.400]  I really appreciate it.
[18:52.400 --> 18:54.400]  If there are any questions, I'm happy to take them.
[18:54.400 --> 19:09.320]  Not actually a question, but I think I don't now remember which opens up project it was,
[19:09.320 --> 19:14.240]  but it might have been KeyCAD actually even, but I remember it was very nice to have like
[19:14.240 --> 19:20.120]  a donation page, which then listed a bunch of new features kind of that came up recently
[19:20.120 --> 19:24.760]  and just said that these were made possible thanks to your help.
[19:24.760 --> 19:25.760]  Yes.
[19:25.760 --> 19:28.560]  I think that was an excellent way to think about it because it's true.
[19:28.560 --> 19:29.560]  Yeah.
[19:29.560 --> 19:37.440]  So the statement was that you can show what the donations have done with and one of the
[19:37.440 --> 19:43.880]  things that KeyCAD does is after you donate, it shows you a thank you page after the donation
[19:43.880 --> 19:48.080]  and that it has a little graphic of all the things that we've done in the past year and
[19:48.080 --> 19:51.240]  we update that about once a year or so.
[19:51.240 --> 19:52.240]  So yeah.
[19:52.240 --> 19:53.240]  Yeah.
[19:53.240 --> 19:54.240]  There we go.
[19:54.240 --> 19:55.240]  Yes.
[19:55.240 --> 20:04.040]  How and why did you understand that these implementation were in such a way?
[20:04.040 --> 20:09.880]  So the question was how and why do we know that we need to make changes?
[20:09.880 --> 20:12.960]  We weren't where we needed to be.
[20:12.960 --> 20:21.560]  So we wanted to support full-time developers and we did not have the funding level to be
[20:21.560 --> 20:22.720]  able to do that.
[20:22.720 --> 20:32.360]  So we wanted to increase that to be able to develop the project faster and better and
[20:32.360 --> 20:37.880]  we knew because we'd periodically dog food it ourselves.
[20:37.880 --> 20:44.840]  We'd try and the developers will donate not just our time but we'll practice going through
[20:44.840 --> 20:47.720]  the donation page and it was painful.
[20:47.720 --> 20:50.880]  So we'd click and we'd be like, okay, come on, come on, come on, come on.
[20:50.880 --> 20:59.000]  And then we'd get there and I had to pull up the, like, how much is 120 Swiss franc
[20:59.000 --> 21:01.440]  in euro?
[21:01.440 --> 21:05.400]  Now I know but intuitively I didn't know that.
[21:05.400 --> 21:13.440]  So dog fooding what you build is an important step and it costs you a five dollar donation
[21:13.440 --> 21:17.960]  which is, you know, you run it through there and you're supporting a good project when
[21:17.960 --> 21:18.960]  you do this.
[21:18.960 --> 21:19.960]  Yes.
[21:19.960 --> 21:27.920]  How do you handle one-time donation versus recurring donation?
[21:27.920 --> 21:31.480]  So the question is how do you handle one-time donation versus recurring donation?
[21:31.480 --> 21:38.320]  So we have right here a highlighted one-time and monthly.
[21:38.320 --> 21:45.000]  So we have this option and you can set up the back end to do that.
[21:45.000 --> 21:50.840]  Right now we only support that through PayPal because we don't want to be responsible for
[21:50.840 --> 21:54.280]  keeping track of user accounts.
[21:54.280 --> 21:58.760]  And PayPal allows you to set up subscriptions without the user account.
[21:58.760 --> 22:04.240]  So right now we do that through PayPal but the thing to watch out for is to make sure
[22:04.240 --> 22:10.920]  in your design that you're very, very clear about what the user is, do they have a subscription
[22:10.920 --> 22:12.040]  or do they have a one-time.
[22:12.040 --> 22:16.720]  So when you click on this, instead of saying donate, this says donate via PayPal or donate
[22:16.720 --> 22:23.400]  via credit card, e-wallet, instead of saying donate, we change that to subscribe.
[22:23.400 --> 22:30.400]  So we do a couple of things to make it really, really obvious that if you move this slider
[22:30.400 --> 22:36.400]  over here and click on this button, you're signing up for a monthly subscription.
[22:36.400 --> 22:38.400]  We still have people making the mistake though.
[22:38.400 --> 22:43.080]  So we're still working out, we're still doing AB testing to see can we get that better.
[22:43.080 --> 22:44.080]  Yes.
[22:44.080 --> 23:02.760]  The suggestion is to have a separate button for the subscribe, yes.
[23:02.760 --> 23:06.640]  I'm going to AB test that and we'll see what comes out.
[23:06.640 --> 23:07.640]  Yes.
[23:07.640 --> 23:29.200]  You absolutely can and I skipped by a couple of the options here for, here we go.
[23:29.200 --> 23:37.640]  So open collective, Patreon, coffee, Linux foundation, if that's where your community is,
[23:37.640 --> 23:38.640]  do that.
[23:38.640 --> 23:39.640]  Absolutely.
[23:39.640 --> 23:40.880]  That's fantastic.
[23:40.880 --> 23:47.400]  If your community is on coffee, you should have coffee on there.
[23:47.400 --> 23:57.160]  But there's a balance to be struck and open collective is nice, but it's one, two, three
[23:57.160 --> 24:03.520]  clicks deep and we've never seen a way to shorten that and we can't cash it.
[24:03.520 --> 24:10.160]  So it does add a couple of steps, but I do know a lot of projects that use it successfully
[24:10.160 --> 24:11.640]  and that like it a lot.
[24:11.640 --> 24:18.480]  So definitely, you know, test it out, but try to replace one of the buttons, AB testing
[24:18.480 --> 24:23.800]  with open collective and see if that's where your community is and the only way you know
[24:23.800 --> 24:30.200]  that is by checking.
[24:30.200 --> 24:57.760]  Thank you.