TipiT.to

Very unfortunately at a recent Plone conference Sree’s laptop got stolen. So to help him replace his laptop they setup a webpage to raise donations and they used a TipiT tipjar for the donations.

This is interesting and it is definitely a use case of TipiT but what is even more interesting is that TipiT isn’t the only service they setup to receive donations with. In fact the first link they have is for a cause on ChipIn. Now if you follow the links to both pages, you can see that TipiT has raised more than twice as much money for the same cause in a straight side-by-side test.

Just look at the screenshots:

Why is this the case?

Figuring out why this is the case requires some guesswork. I think we have the better albeit somewhat barebones donation system but the core of the difference is probably one vital factor: Paypal.

ChipIn uses Paypal as a payment processor and that will kill your conversion dead in its tracks. We know because we used Paypal and are intimately familiar with its integration options. Paypal offers a complete experience and for somebody who has an account already setup with an associated payment method, checkout is indeed very smooth. For somebody who doesn’t have that (which is still a very large part of the internet), the mental cost of setting all of that up just for one donation is too high.

Compare that to our checkout process which is just a form on our website where you enter your credit card number and the payment is processed directly. It’s not very hard to figure out that that is conceptually much more easy for a larger amount of people and therefore yields a higher conversion rate.

So important lesson: if you want to make donations really easy, it’s not enough to just integrate with a monolithic walled garden payment processor. Make it really easy.

Seth Godin writes a brief blog post that ads are the new online tipjar. I would like to disagree first and foremost because ads are not the new online tipjar, tipjars are.

Secondly ads are a strange thing. They are a semi-interested third party that meddles into your interaction with a site with this interjection: “Hey, you liked STUFF! Maybe you want to buy my discounted and improved STUFF. Click here and get your credit card ready.”

Many site owners for reasons of taste do not want to put ads on their website. Adding commercial messages to what is a very personal publication may not feel right to them not to mention that it could display messages not completely to your liking.

Add to this the fact that very few websites make significant ad income. This may be because as Seth claims it is not ingrained yet in us to click on an ad every time we read something interesting but a more importantly factor is the willingness of the sponsor to pony up money.
You need to be writing very focusedly about very specific subjects to be able to generate significant income. The amount of money you get is not determined by the value of your content to your visitor but on the value of the goods your advertisers thinks they can sell through your site. And Google of course takes a cut.

Clicking on stuff to fake your attention would get quite tedious. Remember those make-money-while-browsing-by-watching-ads-schemes? This proposal makes you watch advertising to make money for other people (if the site owners did it themselves it would constitute click fraud). And this scheme definitely does not work for Cost per Action models where people receive a kickback based on actual sales.

We at Tipit.to envision a web where a rich ecosystem of free content flourishes as it already does currently but where it is easy and indeed an accepted protocol for people consuming that content to give back if they wish, when they wish and as much as they wish.

CC photograph by Karen Ang

You may be wondering if there are strategies that will net your tipjar more money. Getting people to pay you money is mostly your own responsibility. Tipit.to provides the infrastructure and publishes sites that get tipped, but the people most inclined to tip your site are the visitors of your site, not visitors to Tipit.to.

There seem to be a couple of obvious things that make a difference in the amount of clickthroughs on the Tipit.to button and the amount of money donated.

1. Put your Tipit.to button in a prominent place.
2. Tell people to click on it, either with text around the button or in a post. We are going to make the Photoshop files available, so you can make your own Tipit.to buttons.
3. Make it clear what the money is going to be used for (also in the description).
   Things like server costs and other necessary stuff for the continuity of your site stand a good chance of netting a contribution. Promising that you will do something for your visitors when you get certain amounts of money could also be a nice strategy.

A site which has taken the effort to really integrate the Tipit.to button and has netted a lot of of referral clicks is Image*After.com.

After the launch this Wednesday, we saw we needed to add some features and clarification here and there. Both based on your feedback and on what we had lying around ourselves.

First the frontpage with the statistics for popular sites has been added. Because we are in the early stages now and don’t have many real tips yet, we have chosen to list tip intentions in the statistical views of the site.
We are still debating how far we should weigh intentions, but the plan is to show them for now but phase them out in the near future. People tipping large bogus tips, will immediately get notifications that they should pay up.

Further we are going to add more lists with interesting data through various places so that you can browse through the site and have something to look at. And a nice way to find and add friends will be added.

In the mean time, keep the feedback and the tips coming.