On Mon, Oct 19, 2015 at 11:27 AM, Aaron Wolf <[email protected]>
wrote:
On 10/19/2015 08:20 AM, Stephen Michel wrote:
In short, I don't believe we actually need any change to the
mechanism;
we just need to lower the minimum and encourage donation at
above-minimum levels.
We should do this by keeping in mind that *the average user will
tend to
stick with the defaults.* Therefore, if we set the recommended
pledge
level above the minimum, so long as that pledge level is reasonable
(ie,
easily within the user's budget), they will stick with that donation
level. I propose the following. Note: numbers are rather arbitrary,
I
just wanted to give a concrete example/idea.
let n refer to the number of users.
- Lower the minimum contribution to $1 per 5000 users.
There's no basis for you to speculate that this lower minimum makes
any
sense. These types of changes are only sensible once we can operate
and
see how the numbers play out. Our current baseline is as good an
appropriate guess and easier to calculate and explain.
I think you need to read
https://snowdrift.coop/p/snowdrift/w/en/limits
I have read this.
- For small n (< 100), the recommended contribution is $1 per 1000
users.
- For n <= 100, the recommended contribution is the average of other
users' contribution.
We don't want to recommend people counteracting the network effect.
That
would mean a message to others that says "if you join, others will
adjust their pledge downward and actually *not* match you really".
There's very probably some phrasing improvements. However:
1. When you join, others will match you at the level they have
selected, no matter what. The messaging should be:
- "If you join, current patrons will donate $X more."
- This is a simple concept which everyone gets.
- "Future patrons will match you at a level they choose. We'll
recommend they match you 1:1, so if you donate more/less, we'll
recommend they match YOU more/less respectively.
- This is slightly more complicated. Probably, this puts the idea
outside the scope of our MVP. This is fine.
- This is presented to the user as "match other users 1:1"
- The user has an option to match at a different rate, but it's
not
highlighted visually.
- If a user does opt to change their rate, the following
message is
displayed:
- "This will [increase/decrease] the recommended
donation[!/.]"
Hopefully this allows for all of the following:
- A social incentive to donate more (increase the recommended
donation).
- A way to donate less with a reasonable social "penalty."
- if there's no "penalty," people may try to calculate the "best
deal"
of matching, ie, always donate the minimum.
- if there's too much "penalty," it may dissuade people who
actually
can't afford it from donating.
- An elegant way to handle higher and lower contribution levels (ie,
adds little complexity).
- An intuitive way to present higher and lower donation levels to
users.
Thoughts?
All these goals are captured in our initial formula:
https://snowdrift.coop/p/snowdrift/w/en/formula
It has all the right properties to encourage larger pledges,
discourage
reducing your pledge, *allow* reducing your pledge… and we even
originally started with a minimum that was a tenth the size of the
current proposed minimum. So your thinking is exactly where we started
with all this.
The problem is that all this just leads to too much complexity, too
much
to explain, too many qualifications over the plain pledge concept, and
so we really need to focus on launching without all this for now. The
explanation of it all is just too cumbersome. The principles would be
ideal to have, but we can't make it work practically.
This is where I want to stress the difference here: ***this is NOT
actually a change of formula!*** For any individual patron the formula
is still, "I'm pledging to donate X per patron."
It's a change in the level of donation that we recommend. Actually, how
we decide on that level of recommendation can be *completely* hidden
from the user.
~~Most~~ All of this is simply a change in how we present information
to the user.
The point, is, I believe this, IFF we do the messaging right, is a way
to get back some of the benefits of the original pledge mechanism,
without a substantial increase to the complexity of the system,
particularly from the user's point of view.
Most users will only ever see a button like:
/-------------------------------------\
| **PLEDGE** |
| (recommended donation)" |
\-------------------------------------/
(change donation level)
~Stephen
~Stephen
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Aaron Wolf Snowdrift.coop <https://snowdrift.coop>
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