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In beta, Mark wrote "New feature: donations"


I'll be looking at this to see if it makes sense for my PTA group. We upgrade to the "Premium for a month" plan every school year during registration, as that is when we collect the bulk of our new unit members, and our existing unit members must renew.

We used to sign up this year's members during registration at the school, collecting cash, check, or credit card swipes via square. Along with the member's contact info on a membership form. So Direct Add (a premium feature) was the most practical way of getting all the members added to our group.

The school is transitioning from paper, in-person, registration to (mostly) online registration. This challenges our PTA unit to keep pace: the school cannot accept funds (our annual dues) on our behalf so we'll want our own way to accept payment online. We'll toss this new feature into consideration for next year.

A question then is whether we ought to stay on the Premium plan year-round. Maybe, we'll see how that might work.

But I think this new capability raises a similar question for other groups that are now using the Basic plan. If the group is tied to an organization that collects dues it may be an easy choice.

But what about independent groups? If you have a large enough membership does it make sense to go to the Premium plan and hope to defray the cost by way of donations? Can you afford to pick up the tab if donations don't meet the cost? Do you accept further donations once you've covered the cost of Premium? And if so, what do you with the additional funds?

Lots of leading questions there. I expect that there may be as many answers (good and bad) as there are groups. So is this feature a non-starter? Do we now "live in interesting times"?

Shal


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On Sat, May 4, 2019 at 03:35 PM, Shal Farley wrote:

So is this feature a non-starter? Do we now "live in interesting times"?

Yes, and yes.

Mark might want to consider opening this option to Basic groups. Expecting groups to pay for Premium only to skim another 20% off the top is kinda extreme.?

Suddenly the checkout fees our club is paying to collect credit card payments via PayPal are sounding like a real bargain.
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My $0.02,
Bruce?
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Bruce,

Expecting groups to pay for Premium only to skim another 20% off the
top is kinda extreme.

o ... which includes all credit card processing fees.

So Groups.io nets maybe 17 or 18%, but you have a point.

My PTA unit decided to simply absorb the 2 or 3% charged by Square rather than try to charge the extra to the unit member. For us that made sense because getting the payment while the parent was standing there at registration was far more certain than trying to collect it later.

I'm not sure I could claim with a straight face that a 20% fee would still be a net benefit compared not having online payments at all. Even less so compared with other forms of online payment. Of course, in an all-volunteer organization like a PTA unit, the decision often boils down to "who's going to set it up and run it?" - that person tends to have final say on what "it" is.

Shal


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