CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

CiviCRM has a great community - we do a pretty good job of helping each other but one area that is really difficult (and perhaps this is common in the open source world) is that it is really hard to work together financially.

At the moment there are a number of 'popular' projects on the roadmap http://wiki.civicrm.org/confluence/display/CRM/CiviCRM+v3.3 that would be REALLY useful for a lot of organisations. The problem is there might be 10 organisations who would be prepared to put up $500 towards being able to use a profile to collect on-behalf-of org data (rather than current fixed fields) but it's REALLY hard to bring this insufficient offerings together. To make it more difficult there is quite often an organisation that is prepared to put up $2000 but ONLY if it goes further & allows relationships other than just current employer to be worked in this way.

I think potentially if CiviCRM.org set up contribution pages / allowed personal campaign pages for features requiring sponsorhip it would help to try to pool together. Of course, the problem is that if you allow pay later you have to collect the money later. And if you don't then what happens to the funds if the threshhold isn't met. Despite these limitations setting up contributions pages to sponsor features would be a step forward.

Fantacising for a moment I'm going to also describe the system that would REALLY work from our perspective. (co-incidentally this is also a lot like what a 'great thinker' described as the future of payroll giving but that was cross-charity')

Basically it is pretty much like USER VOICE but instead of getting 10 votes each you get votes based on the amount of money you put in. You can assign your votes to the various projects and re-assign them if you wish until a project you have 'voted' on hits the threshhold - at which point the votes disappear. The votes would have to be paid for up front and would be a irrevocable donation - albeit one that you have some control over.

From the perspective of a company like Fuzion we would make a donation of $2000. If a customer is prepared to pay $500 for something we would 'vote' $500 on it for them. If it doesn't come to fruition or they pull support we would remove our vote. If it did hit the threshhold we'd bill them & replenish our pot of votes with the money. Seeing a project at 80% might also encourage votes from someone who otherwise wouldn't donate or try to sponsor a project.

Of course - the cost-benefit of setting up contribution pages or PCPs is far more certain.....

Actually - I'm not imagining the money being refunded - I'm imagining the consultants have an ongoing relationship / want to support CiviCRM anyway & leave it in but obviously that's only one perspective

Looking at kickstarter.com I'd be inclined to to an initial effort in CiviCRM instead because it gives more options. What you'd do is pick approx 4 of the popular items seeking sponsorship & set up 4 contribution pages. One the contribution pages you would need to give a radio button :

- 'only charge my credit card if this (or another of my preferences) reaches the threshhold ' OR
- 'charge my credit card now - this is a donation regardless of whether the threshhold is reached'

You can use the payment processor hook to set the payment type to 'AUTH' if they choose the first option. This is valid for 29 days & you'd probably run the contribution page for say 21. At the end of the 21 days you would look at whether any of the pages had reached the target. If so you would log into paypal & confirm the relevant payments. If not you'd let the AUTH expire.

You'd also have custom fields on the form indicating preferences for where to put the $ if it doesn't make it - basically the other 3 contribution page options, please restart the collection & put my $ towards it (only for paid up donations) or please treat as a general donation (only for paid up).

The conditions would need to state clearly that for paid up donations best efforts would be used to respect preferences but no commitment.

So, at the end of your 3 weeks you might find that none of the projects have reached the threshold but one or two of them would reach it if you take into account people's preferences as well as their first options - in which case you'd re-assign stuff & confirm credit card payments as appropriate. So, in Fuzion's case we have some money 'tagged' that we'd either like to go towards improvements to managing on-behalf of forms / shared addresses on front end forms or improvements to the dedupe UI. If we were able to indicate a second choice then we wouldn't have to choose to support one only to get neither when it doesn't make the threshhold.

It's a little mucky but I think cobbling together support from many parties is mucky & you wouldn't have any pay laters to deal with. I think you might capture donations that you wouldn't otherwise get

Further down the track you could look at exposing the contribution page ID & preferences so people can re-allocate their own money during the course of an appeal

I also think you would want soft credits enabled

In terms of development for 'phase 1' there is only a very minor hook - to set whether the payment is authorise or capture - I was imagining every thing else be done through existing functionality or manually until the concept was proven (if there is almost no uptake it's not a hassle to manage manually & it wouldn't last long, if there is then it's probably a hassle you wouldn't begrudge in the short term & it would justify a greater effort in the medium term).

I don't mind writing the hook but most of what is involved is setting up a contribution page on your civicrm install, agreeing wording & fields & pushing payments through / killing them via the paypal interface (which is probably something you want to do yourself).

Happy to work with Michael / someone else if people think it's worth trying