Donations

Art Andrews

Community Founder
Community Staff
Hello all,

We are currently working on a plan to make TDH a self-sustaining entity but until that time comes, we still strongly depend on your donations to pay the bills. Last month was a record low for donations and didn't even cover 10% of our monthly costs.

We believe that part of the problem is that the donation bar in the forum header has been there for so long that members tend to simply overlook it.

We are preparing to remove this bar, only leaving the link in the navigation bar for donation and once a month, during the first week of the month, have a mini-donation drive banner (much like the patch banner) at the top of the forum until we reach our monthly goal. We hope this will 1) attract more attention 2) remove the current donation banner thus uncluttering the board and 3) help us meet our monthly donation goals.

Thank you to all those who have donated in the past and all those who will give in the future. As I mentioned, we are working towards making TDH self-sustaining and look forward to the day when we no longer need your financial support.
 
What kinds of things can a forum based website like this do to become self-sustaining? The only thing I can think of off the top of my head is advertising, but I'm not sure.
 
Targeted text link advertising is certainly one way of generating funding as well as targeted runs of product such as our current patch run and upcoming coin run. You will most likely see more of both in the future and if they succeed and provide the funding we need, you will also begin to see more and more features become available to the site that we have wanted to provide but have not had the funding to do so.
 
Just curious guys...who is hosting the TDH site?

GoDaddy has 3 years of hosting for $152.00. If you switched to them, you would only need 50.00/year in donations to break even. I don't know what amount in donations you get each year, but I'm hoping it exceeds $50.00/year.

- and no, I don't work for GoDaddy. I do host about 4 personally owned websites with them and would recommend them to anyone looking for reasonable web hosting.

Take care and thanks for the BEST Boba Fett Costume Forum on the web !!

Todd
Phoenix, Arizona
 
Since I handle a lot of the hosting stuff, I will pop in for this one.

We used to be hosted on a shared plan which was very cheap. Unfortunately, the volume of people who visit TDH on a monthly basis has increased at an incredible rate in the past couple of years. We now have as many if not more unique visitors each month as some much larger sites! With the amount of traffic we now get we can't be hosted on a shared plan any longer and now require a "dedicated" solution. Unfortunately, dedicated service is much more expensive and it is costing us $120 a month for hosting alone, which doesn't include any other services. We are currently looking for ways to cut costs, but we are completely unwilling to cut the level of service we are providing our members, so we are a bit between a rock and a hard place, a victim of our own success. I am sure not complaining but it can make things challenging.
 
Well I hope this site pulls through, it's an amazing resource and a dedicated community of awesome people... Although I haven't been able to donate any funds directly yet as the costume (as well as life itself) are costing me a pretty penny, I put my $5 in for one of your patches! Hopefully once my costume is done and I am in a bit more money I'll be able to help you guys out more :D
 
On the hosting note...

The trouble with things like that godaddy plan, dreamhost, etc... is that they don't really think of multi-thousand user forums with MASSIVE amounts of image reference available.

Even just finding someone that will let us have all of the images we have is challenging.

The site used to be very, very slow, and down more often than I'd like to think about. The current solution is rock solid, but spendy.

It's the same hosting company that the 501st uses for 501st.com/501stforums.com.

On the 501st side we do an annual fund drive to collect 12 months of money, rather than the monthly donations. It may be worth thinking about that... get it over with for a year.
 
Runs of TDH merch are cool, I saw a calander idea and a t shirt design thread, both of which I would buy into and pay over and above if raising funds for TDH.

How come donations are not instant?
 
How about a nominal charge for using the cargo hold? It would only need to be a £1 or so per transaction, but over a month...

We would be MILLIONAIRES! :lol:lol: No doubt,the Cargo Hold gets more traffic than any other area of the site... we have considered making it a subscription section... but would really prefer not to as a lot of lurkers use it as well.
 
I don't think regular lurkers are going to be run off by a small subscription cost. If they're regular they already recognize the value they receive from the access and it might encourage them to participate more.

Says the newb.




PS: donation incoming
 
How about a membership fee, like subs? If you did not pay the fee you would see the new ads all over and may be ristricted in areas you can not go?

This would be something like an anual fee, $25 or more. Including t shirt or something?

Or what about a banner like the patch one that you can only get off if out donate that month, I bought some patches right away to get it off, only to find the hide button about a week later LOL.
 
with the tremendous popularity of sites like facebook I think most people are so accustom to seeing ads that adding a few wouldn't be that bad, and most folks, especially new folks just joining would never really know the difference. As long as there's no pop-ups or click-throughs I don't see the harm in an ad on one side or along the bottom
 
NEF,

I am not sure if you were here back in the days of As You Wish, but we were on an ezboard that had so many pop-ups and pop-unders that you literally couldn't surf the board. And I absolutely hate clickthroughs, like the ones one starwars.com. While we need to generate revenue to run the site, the MOST important thing is that our members experience here at TDH is exceptional.
 
Exactly...the experience is what is important. I'm right with you there, and the ads along the right side of facebook don't bother me at all, most of the time I completely ignore them. No pop-ups or unders or clickthroughs; those would hinder the experience, a banner at the bottom or a box along the side probably wouldn't. I like the runs of merchandise idea, transaction fees on the cargo hold (that would be a pain in the rear though on the admin side I'm sure). I like the idea of annual or maybe quarterly donation drives as well.

I think I discovered TDH through a friend just after CII if I remember correctly; I was on the TUBFC listserve back in 98-99ish though...completely missed out on the fett community from....say 2000-2002. From what I've gathered from being here since then I missed some exciting years as far as discoveries etc.
 
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