Members increase, donations to an all time low.

[Bram Hengeveld]

Guys RD is heading fast into the direction of red numbers. As i have financed the first year of this community out of my own pocket, I am not going down that road again.

We can survive one month without your support, but a second one will probably result in that we have to let go of a game- and download server

With a few thousand people in the racing club you expect that dropping in a few cents every month would pay our bills with ease.

We really need your help.

 

[Knut Omdal Tveito]

Forgot to donate last month. 20EUR sent now. Thanks for the remainder Bram

 

[Bram Hengeveld]

Wow, that's awesome Knut :thumbup:!

 

[Maurice Hurkmans]

Was some time ago that i did my last donation, a good time again to spend some money for the good cause

thanks for the heads up guys!

 

[Hannu Karesola]

Also dropped euros to RD this morning and then saw this topic. Come on fellow racers we need game- and dowload servers. It's great RD has downloadable stuff right here when we need it to club or league races.

 

[Stuart Thomson]

I think, because of the forum upgrade and the loss of that reminder bar, people have forgotten about the donations.

Not everyone goes via the Front page, where the only real donation reminder is - I come straight into the forum myself, so others probably do as well.

A graphical reminder somewhere on the forum main page would be good if it could be done.

 

[Peter Duivelaar]

donated.

 

[Yves Larose]

5 Euro on its way and i agree with Stu if it would be possible to get the donation bar on the main forum page i think it would help :smile:

 

[Bram Hengeveld]

Ehm not sure if you have your forum bars enabled but its there on the top Yves

 

[Stuart Thomson]

To be honest, I don't have the bar open either, Bram.

I prefer as wide a screen as possible on the forum, personally.

Again, if I have it like that, no doubt some others have it set that way too.

 

[Ben Tusting]

To be honest, I don't have the bar open either, Bram.

I prefer as wide a screen as possible on the forum, personally.

Again, if I have it like that, no doubt some others have it set that way too.

lus1:

 

[Stuart Thomson]

But, having said that - I remembered to donate, so it's not really an issue for me.

It is a problem for others, by the looks of things, and anything that can keep the matter being discussed will, hopefully, remind a few others to do the decent thing and put their hand in their pocket for all the good stuff they're getting for free.

Some people are not in a position to contribute, but I'm sure a lot are, and it's those who need to heed the call.

 

[Bram Hengeveld]

yeah now the guys that work here the most hours (staff) are donating again Its the world on its head.

I think the problem is the memberbase. People see 34,000 and think: if they all donate 1 euro per year RD has 34,000 EUR, so i can pass! Unfortunately its nothing like that lol, I wish they all did: then we could pay all expences for RD for the next 8 years!!

 

[Tobias Kluge]

Do I get the nice donator flag, when I'm using the credit card of my room mate? I'm vain, I know!

 

[Mike Coleman]

Hehe I want the donator flag too :tongue:

Donating......

 

[Eric. K]

You will all get the flag as soon as Ramon process all the donations!!

 

[AMA_King]

Whoo-hoo! I forgot that I will get a donor flag!

Why does the PayPal gizmo only to to $10 USD?
- I was gonna' give more...

Can you send me an automated REMINDER PM every month?
- can you send one to ALL members?

Does vBulletin have a sidebar widget thing to illustrate monthly donations like a thermometer?
- like this: http://www.donationstracker.com

Even if you have 34,000 members, how many UNIQUE's do you get each month?
- would a cool analytics tool help motivate members?
- http://siteanalytics.compete.com/vbulletin.com

 

[Ramon van Rijn]

For those rich boys currently wanting to donate more, you can directly transfer any amount in Paypal do RD's Paypal account on donate{at}racedepartment.com.

For everyone: Please try to type your Forum name in the description if possible. For some donators its hard to track who it was. Sometimes the name or the email address match, for some nothing matches because of using another creditcard or so. Very hard to judge.

The best thing would be to have the old forum mod back with the donation bar, but the mod creator is not currently supporting vb4.x.

Tonight I will process the donations so far again, then every donator should have the tag

 

[Patrick Speleman]

Donation for february done with :biggrin:

 

[Ramon van Rijn]

Can you send me an automated REMINDER PM every month?
- can you send one to ALL members?

Even if you have 34,000 members, how many UNIQUE's do you get each month?
- would a cool analytics tool help motivate members?
- http://siteanalytics.compete.com/vbulletin.com

Forgot to answer those questions

Yes we can send mail to all members. But earning donation money is not our main goal. This will put too much pressure on people to be forced, which is not nice. We hope enough people are willing to pay a bit in helping us survive.

We have indeed 34000 members. But you will be surprised how much actually are donating. Currently (not up-to-date) we have exactly 102 members with a donator tag. I will update this number tonight when I have processed the latest donations.
I am a bit behind with cleaning up donator tags because we don't have a good donators management tool at the moment. The previous tool on vBulletin 3.8 was excellent, but now its 100% manual work. So members donated around oct/nov will still carry the tag for the moment.

On average about 20-40 people are now monthly donating. Donations coming in are ranging from $5 - 10pound. Make the math yourself.
In the past some members paid 15/20 or even more (some much more).

We think 5-10Eur max should be enough. If 25% of our current Racing Club (1588Members) would donate only 1 Eur each month we can cover our expenses. Imo its a shame this is still not possible for most of us.

Imo people are still thinking we could drive Porsches from RD. Actually we are paid 0/nothing. 34000 members and only 102 donators over the last 4 months where some paid more than once.

RD costs are:
- Servers (2 raceservers costing 86eur each per month; 1 dedicated webserver hosting forum/timing/gpcos/downloads/frontpage/etc which cost 106 eur each month)
- Domains (RaceDepartment.com, RaceDept.com, NationGP.com, etc.)
- Licenses (vBulletin and update/support license, vBSeo, GPCos, Server OS

Our total costs are somewhere between 340-360 eur /month.

And to be completely honest, we have exactly 760 euro on RD's bank account (Paypal) which is enough for 2 months breathing space. (next billing date will be in about 2 weeks) When donations were better coming in it was somewhere between 1000-1200 eur on the paypal account. The last 3 months the money flow is decreasing rapidly.

To conclude, many thanks so far for all donations. Hopefully many will follow; As said if 25% of the racingclub (licensed members) would donate 1 eur each month we have a glorious future ahead.

If someone knows a good sponsor, even better! Its a shame such a 'big' site as RD does not attract sponsors themself.