Improve donate Call To Action

[chris48s]

We've got a bit of an issue with cashflow. In November and December this year we brought in about the same or less in donations than we paid out in costs, and our spend with Fly will be increasing in January. There are a few things going on here. Our costs with Fly are going up due to platform changes on their side, and also the amount of donations we're receiving is going down. Sponsors come and sponsors go. That said, the most significant development is that Octopus Deploy are no longer sponsoring us. Octopus Deploy were by far our largest financial donor and contributed over $5,000 to the project over the years they sponsored us. They made their last donation to us in October. To be honest, for a long time the donations from Octopus Deploy alone were enough to fully sustain our activities, even if we had lost every other sponsor.

This is not an immediate emergency. Since we moved to fly in April 2022, we've been routinely bringing in more in donations than we needed to cover our costs each month. As a result, we have built up a fairly decent buffer in OpenCollective. If our costs are a bit higher than our income for a while, we can continue to cover it. However from January we are going to be eating in to our savings each month and this will not be a sustainable long-term position.

As a first step, I've decided to review our calls to donate. This is something we've not really put much effort into in the past. This was mainly because we were operating at a surplus.

Now seems like a good time to:

• Make the "donate" call to action more prominent on shields.io
• Explain more clearly how shields is funded and how we spend donations

Maybe this will help 🤞

Side note: I'd quite like to fiddle with our OpenCollective page a bit too. Can anyone @badges/shields-maintainers make me an admin there?

Finally, I'm very open to suggestions on other things we could do here.

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[chris48s]

I'm not aware of us having ever done this. Removing to reflect how we actually spend donations.

[chris48s]

I'm less confident in this change. My theory is that naming an amount (and being ambiguous about whether it is one-off or monthly) might put people off? Lets try removing the concrete ask for an amount on the in-repo donate CTAs and just point people who are interested at OpenCollective for a menu of options.

[PyvesB]

We've discussed this a few times now, I'd personally argue the single biggest threat to the Shields.io project is Tracy Mendez, Paul's accountant.

• In 2023 she charged us $35/month for, from what I can tell, a single monthly Fly.io bill to be paid on our behalf; my understanding is that Heroku + Runbox are still paid via Paul directly. This is comparatively equivalent to almost a half of our current Fly.io infra costs, and is nothing short of a rip-off.
• Some months are charged double, the "Expense Administration - Jan to Oct 2022" fee covers the amount of 13 months instead of 10, two separate entries cover November and December 2023 as well. I don't know why, it's all very opaque.
• In 2023, there was a 4x increase in admin fees that came as a surprise to us, and that applied retroactively to an entire year. We haven't yet paid for 2024, if this kind of steep retroactive increase happened again with some months being charged twice, our buffer could melt down in the blink of an eye and the project could become financially unsustainable very quickly.
• Unfortunately, I'm not even a regular member of the OpenCollective org, and no one is admin aside from Paul and Tracy. We don't have any control and are at the mercy of someone else's actions.

@paulmelnikow could we get your input here?

[github-actions]

🚀 Updated review app: https://pr-10777-badges-shields.fly.dev

[PyvesB]

Above rant aside, changes look good, let's give them a try!