[TriLUG] Hostile Thread Takeover: T-Shirts

[Pete Soper via TriLUG]

On 8/12/19 1:34 PM, Brian McCullough via TriLUG wrote:

>> Brian, is there a way for remote donors to donate electronically?
> Not that I know of, yet, but I will ask around.
>
I was struck by Matt's implicit suggestions. I have six PCB Carolina 
shirts and one TriLUG and wish I had more balance, both with the shirts 
and $$ I send to whatever tax shelter Amazon uses vs local business.

But Maurico's posting gave me an "if it isn't broken, don't fix it" 
reaction as I considered our current, seemingly post-volunteerism age, 
so the Amazon setup seems good, especially since one shirt per six 
months could not possibly justify a change to something arguably less 
convenient for many.

So, to paraphrase the Twitter CEO's recent admission about their UI 
being less than  optimal, perhaps a "donate button" and/or email footer 
equivalent needs to be harder to miss. And yes, without the Chrome 
extension or a big fat bookmark and carefully developed habit missing 
the "smile" subdomain is just going to happen.

And then there's Brian M's earlier posting, so the rest of this is 
overlapped with getting off my butt and looking for a stamp and my check 
book (remember them?). But I'm hopeless with manual bill paying month 
after month, so I'll press on with another two cents.

A relatively simple setup (I suggest Stripe) that would pull X dollars 
periodically out of my bank account would give TriLUG some reliable 
dollars almost immediately (or, at least until my daughter announces she 
wants to do course work in parallel at a third grad school!). I suggest 
the smallest minimum practical periodic donation be allowed (i.e. weigh 
the pain of the cut taken against the number of folks who could part 
with, say $3/month vs $5 and try to find the sweet spot.) Splatspace 
uses Stripe for membership dues and it is 99.9% pain free for members 
and easy enough on the other side that the treasurer stood for 
reelection. I could facilitate getting details to the committee if there 
is interest. From memory Shaw Terwilliger and/or JC Sackett put some 
magic into a web server page or two and the rest was a few one time 
procedures with Stripe and then of course book keeping handled by Dawn 
Trembath (but one more potential overhead mentioned below).

Yes, I'm sure the steering committee has discussed this topic for 
cumulative person weeks or months over the years and I'm being grossly 
presumptuous.

But the deal with these automagic, periodic payments out of one's bank 
account is that it's twice as hard to turn them off as on. This is 
because we perceive the donating as valuable and Thaler's "endowment 
effect" observation of how real human beings tick asserts I'll perceive 
loss of this valuable thing more than getting it in the first place. But 
maybe some will view donations as a negative up front: YMMV.

Like Brian H, I haven't been to a meeting in a long time, but 
periodically swear "next month, for sure". TriLUG is a precious 
community that deserves support and I would pledge $5/month in a 
heartbeat, but my track record for monthly paperwork stinks and each 
month my pledge would naturally collide with competing things. If it's 
automatic my arguments for putting the $5 into ten liters of A&W diet 
root beer are easily overwhelmed by the thought of having to make the 
effort to opt out ('cause the endowment effect layers an additional 
perceived cost many times greater than the few seconds with my phone).

But I should mention that keeping track of funds is serious work, and 
over the long haul it can create peculiar problems, such as having many 
$K in the bank but being paranoid and paralyzed by the mere idea of 
spending it on anything except pizza (as was the case with TriJUG years 
ago). I'm guessing that after all these years (isn't TriLUG about 25 
now?) there is still aversion to dealing with money, and it's 
understandable.

Oh, and I'm typing this on Debian 10. My escape from Ubuntu 18.04 has 
been wildly successful so far! :-)

Pete