Donations for an Open Source generally won't work because of the bystander and freeloader effect.
I mean they work but they're usually a very low percentage of users.
Users A doesn't donate because he knows there's a large percentage of users and he will just let them donate instead.
This really hit me hard with my project because ALL my users say they love the project, couldn't live without it, etc, but when I ask them to donate I get less than 1% of users actually donating.
When I talk to them on the phone, during user interviews, I ask them if they bought the product of if they've donated and they usually say "they don't know why" they haven't donated.
(let's ignore privacy issues with this proposal for a second).
I was thinking that in social situations people donate due to social pressure. What I was thinking of doing is maybe pairing users with someone who has donate and then asking them why haven't they donated?
Basically showing a picture for another user who donated, and then giving them a prompt to answer why they haven't donated.
Curious of your thoughts here.
There was a famous psychological study that showed that just an image of an eye looking at someone caused them to behave fairly in games.
...
Another idea could be to have public badges for the user like "has not supported the project" or (even harsher) "freeloader" or something along those lines.
...
Again. Just thinking out loud here. Some of these might not be workable due to privacy and I'm not trying to be a jerk in this regard.
