Charityware - can it work?
 

Hi,

Following on from David Cruickshank's lead I decided to make my pd website www.amigapd.com charityware and set up a just giving page to support my chosen charity mencap - http://www.justgiving.com/amigapd

After a month there have been two donations, raising £10 in total. David's page has done better raising £57 http://www.justgiving.com/AlienFishFinger

My question is can charityware work - I know from my page visits that each month 135+ people download the public domain cd32 game image and a similar amount the Amiga 1200 CF hard drive file and individual disk images. Even if these visitors only donated £1 the total have cleared a £100 by now - and I am sure there will be considerably more people playing David's game than those who have donated.

Discussion is therefore can charityware work - or is it human nature to download for free?

Update - I have contacted Mencap and they have allowed me to include their logo on the website which I am hoping will raise the profile - any more constructive comments on how to improve charity donations for this website are most welcome.

I'm sure it can and does work for some.

Some people will blindly dip their hands in their pockets everytime they see a collection tin; others will only donate to a charity that has a personal meaning to them.
Plenty are just tired of giving.

Unless you introduce some kind of 'checkout for charity' or manage to increase the site visits, I cannot see a way of increasing your donations... it's up to the individual.

This is meant to be a positive post and I admire your commitment to Mencap.

Keep at it!

"These are compariable to the amounts you would have paid for disks from public domain libaries during the 1990's."

I think that is the problem, you have not taken postage and media costs, and technical advance into account. Also, users generally expect to download PD software for free, that's kind of the point of it :-) .

I understand that users expect PDs to be downloaded for free - but then switching to physcial to media would not work either as people now expect to download images -

What I guess the site needs is some product which people are perpared to pay for -

Perhaps a charity CD32 disk containing full versions of shareware games as I don't think that has been made yet - the website has enabled me to build up some connections with amiga programmers so it might be possible to gain permission. Perhaps this could be avialable for download after completing an online donation.

Other ideas are welcome !

The main thing is - charity generally doesn't get people to buy things they have no interest in or can really easily get for free elsewhere - what charity does is generally to lower peoples demands regarding whatever is for sale through charity... the fact that it's for charity makes it much more likely people will buy the item provided it's something they would like to own anyway... even just a little bit.

Anyway, to sum it up... this is how it works in my experience -

Charity makes people much more likely to buy items as long as the items in question are of interest, even if the interest is quite mild.

Charity does not make people all that much more likely to buy things they have no interest in purchasing whatsoever.

So the problem is finding something you can sell that people would find interesting... I'm sorry I can't help out with that but I'm thinking your idea of a CD32 disk containing full images of lots of shareware games sounds like quite the good idea - provided it's possible to do. I have no idea how it is with Amiga shareware and how much work it is to track down the various creators and getting their permissions... it does sound like quite the project in any case!