Hello everyone,

After getting some negative feedback when asking for donations to help support and expand our community, I decided to ask YOU! our community how you think we should support our community financially. This is your chance to give your input, tell us your ideas below.

The only reason I can understand negative feedback is because the site is just so young.
Other than that, I do think it would be nice for people who use the site regularly and enjoy it, or even could rely on it to keep their SCAdian life organized in one space, could feel good about donating. My husband donates to websites that he uses on a regular basis, as long as he gets something in return that he can "keep", whether it be downloads he finds valuable or something similar.

That is assuming that there are things out there that people want to take the time to create in order to receive monetary "donations" for. Another suggestion is that you could set up space on the site for people to have their own stores..

So that (for example) if I wanted to buy a full set of fighting armor and some bake ware, as well as commission someone to make me a banner.. I could do all of that on one website (and pay for it all on one website, respective of each seller's store).
A "One Stop Shop" if you will.

-Christine

And... Umm.. You know.. Charge a fee for the store.
Sorry, the thought got finished in my head, but didn't fully transfer here lol

Edit:
And offer SCAdians advertising space! Yes, ads are evil. But sometimes, they are necessary for the survival of a web site. At least this way, it would be content relevant.

Ads would be fine by me so long as they were not for post SCA period merchandise. We put up with elf ears and goth clothing at SCA events, but, as I have been told for over a decade, the web is not the SCA. That means this site can hold itself to a higher standard. Just be sure to post those standards for everyone to read in case there is ever a question.

I think doing both the optional donations and offering advertising for merchants would be your best bet. As a merchant I would most like advertise here because this is my target audience. As long as pricing is reasonable of course, being a small business you don't have a lot of funds for advertising.

Pricing ads is a min max problem. On Tribes, Myspace, and Facebook some SCA discussion groups have thousands of members. Tribes is a ghost of what it was, Myspace never did bring much traffic to the discussions. Facebook groups have plenty of members, but some go for weeks or even months with no posts. The real trick is to attract people to join this forum. Once this forum has enough members, merchants will be willing to pay decent ad rates.

All of the above would be good ideas, and in addition, you might be able to get people to pay for a "premium" membership. This could include sections of the forums which are off limits to "free" members, or giving paid members access to apps which free accounts can't use.

Another option would be giving people the chance to offer services in exchange for premium membership. An example would be someone makes a scroll, or perhaps some piece of armour/garb, which they give to the site, and then the site could sell that item. The maker of the piece would gain premium membership for a number of months based on the value of the item (either sold through the site itself, ebay, or some other online merchant), while the site keeps the proceeds from the sale.

I think allowing people to donate to help keep a site running is a great idea. I don't often do so, mainly cause I'm a starving student, but I would for a site like this!

As a web master, I understand the about of work it takes to keep a site like this up and running. It's not just a simple setup and everything works until the end of time. LOL There is Always things to maintain, update or bugs to fix. There this is the hosting costs. DNS is not free.

I would gladly buy ad space on a site like this!

Anyone who is giving you guff cause your asking for donations needs to rethink why they are here...

As a person who grew up in the SCA, the one thing I learned was that we all are a family and we help each other out as much as possible!

Check out www.projectwonderful.com an easy way to sell ad space here and you have total or partial control over ad content. It can be implemented in an instant and in the margins where it will not impact the usefulness or overall feel of the site.

I put out links for this forum on several Tribes discussion groups and on our baronial list serve. I have already seen a number of people from our barony join this community over the past couple days. I actually first heard of this forum on Facebook.

Same here. If it wasn't for Facebook, nobody I know would have known this site existed.