Voluntary Donation at Checkout

#gitcull2017

This is a feature request so moving it out of github.

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Adding some inputs from another GH issue where discussion happened around this (deleting it from there to clean the issue):

Nick was asking:
“One of our UK potential users is a food bank which distributes food that supermarkets are throwing out. In many cases they want to give the food away and then just ask for a donation at the end as part of the check out process. Would it be possible to allow products to be set up with a price of 0.001 so that it rounds to zero and allows products to be given away?”

Sally tested and said:
“yes, possible to have a $0.00 product
Perhaps create new issue for ‘ask for donation at checkout’”

I’m breathing life into this old thread to pitch a proposal…

I would like us to explore an alternate funding model for this feature :exploding_head:

What if…

  1. We take a loan to fund this feature.
  2. We get buy in from our users in this. We agree collectively we’ll fund repayments by directing checkout donations toward the repayment of the loan until it is paid.
  3. Once it is paid users can use it to raise money for their own social impact work.
  4. Once a year we’ll take over the feature for an OFN fundraising drive for one month - kinda like what wikipedia do - to contribute to our annual fundraising efforts.
  5. When enterprises want new features (that we have collectively agreed to work on) we could also use this feature to fundraise for specific pieces of work. Of course this will require a strong roadmap because we won’t be changing priorities for enterprise needs.

That is my proposal.
I think it is genius and that we should do it.
What do y’all think…?

Ooooo - – following you on this stroke of genius… We’ve wondered about OFN fundraisers in a similar vein here.
How much of a loan? I think we might get it from our users versus banks…

Do we imagine there is a donate button - where the donation is channeled to OFNinstance/global account, IN ADDITION TO whatever payment methods the hub has for their ‘other’ sales/payment methods? If so - isn’t this opening the door to splitting payments a bit - like directing payment in 2 different ways at checkout (she asks hopefully…)

I would suggest that in the trial of this business concept we go for a smaller feature with lower risk and lower time until we can start repaying the loan.

This would probably mean that in this implementation the money just goes to the hubs and we invoice them, as we do with user fees now. We can feature toggle the feature so that only hubs that have agreed to this plan can access the feature at first.

Going for a split payment approach on our first try at a funding model like this would dramatically increase the size of the dev, and in turn the size of the risk. I’d be open to scoping and quoting both (we don’t know the size of the loan until we do this), but just want to caveat with this suggestion of baby steps.

Got it - you’re right. Was feeling over-enthusiastic for the first go here… Its a great idea.

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I think its a great idea

I love this idea - It could even offer a donation to OFN global if a hub agreed and that was appropriate. Perhaps like how humble bundles allow you to slide donations.

I would certainly love to do the design investigation/research or one of our enthusiastic new design open source volunteers could!

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Moved to wishlist board: Voluntary Donation at Checkout · Issue #119 · openfoodfoundation/wishlist · GitHub