Lots of open source projects raise money from their user communities by soliciting donations. Ā Most open source projects will have the āSupportā Ā or āMake a Donationā button on their home page or download page. At Eclipse we have had the Friend of Eclipse program for a number of years to solicit financial support for our community.
Earlier this year, we started looking for ways to Ā increase the number of users making donations. Ā We have millions of people downloading Eclipse but very few making donations. Ā Inspired by Ubuntuās new donation page and Mozillaās download page we changed where and how we asked users to make the donation.
The first step was to create a simple and graphically appealing thank you page that requested the user to make a donation. Ā Next we changed where we asked for the donation. We presented the new donation page right after the user started to download Eclipse. Ā Now while the user is waiting for the download to complete they can make the decision to make a donation. Ā Note, we did not ask them before they started the download.
The results have been dramatic. Ā We have seen a 5-6 times increase in the number of people making donations. Ā We now have hundreds of people making a donation each month. I wanted to share these results with everyone so other open source projects might be able to learn from our experience. Ā It was a relatively simple change. Ā Ask for a donation when the download is occurring not when a user is browsing the project site. I also wanted to thank everyone for their support of the Eclipse community. It is great to have your support!
