During the lead up to the launch of the COBOL track, and inspired by the GoBridge thing, I made a couple of informal representations to members of COBOL vendors/trainers. It might have made more impact at the time if it had been more formal and with the backing Exercism itself.
@rhinotastic 's idea has legs. I’ve been mentoring some COBOL students recently and there’s definitely skill out there. That said, one doesn’t want Exercism to become a pawn/mouthpiece of MicroFocus or IBM, but @iHiD has done a great job of maintaining independence so far.
Hi there - this topic caught my eye as a member of GoBridge, where we work to provide donations to the Go track. I’m still reading through these ideas. But wanted to share a few ideas as well. Apologies in advance for any duplicates or previously attempted ideas.
@iHiD you don’t have to share the exact details but I am curious about the goal when you say “In the next 12 months, we need to get to 2,500 active monthly donors to survive.” Is this a goal to get to a particular monetary value you need to hit? Or do you need the 2500 donors to donate X dollars on a monthly basis?
A few ideas I have based of my interactions with Exercism and meetup groups.
@rhinotastic idea about reaching out to other foundations to sponsor a track relevant to their foundation or technology is a good one. Just want to double down on that one
I notice the donate call to action is hidden under the more drop down in the nav bar. Have you considered adding it directly to the nav-bar to grow awareness?
Exercism is a great learning platform and I’ve come across many users who talk about its usage to level up and train members of their team. Having the donate option visible may help.
Related to the donation page, maybe adjusting the pre-selected donation amounts on the donation page to $1, $5, $16, $32 could help draw users to donate to the cause.
I have no proof on this but I think that having the pre-selected value set so high can make a small contribution like $1 or $5 seem insignificant. A recurring $16 a month is no easy feat but $1 may be a bit more doable.
Have a monthly or quarterly sponsored track where an organization or individual who really likes the platform can donate and have their logo and short bio show up on the track.
Does the funding work to cover the cost of infrastructure running the Exercism platform? If so, would some cloud providers be willing to provide compute resources and funding for the platform. This is a nice story to hear about Company X providing resources for the Exercism learning platform.
New user here. +1 to price-pointing, and multiple tiers of it.
Apparently, there is no easy way to setup recurring donations without also subscribing to Insiders. (>=$10)
What I tried:
Click on “Enjoying Exercism? We need your help to survive…”
The only option there is “Donate to Exercism to access Insiders”
Click that (try anyways), and input $5. The submission button is ghosted out, and you will get error:
Please note: The minimum donation amount for Insiders Access is $10.00. Thank you for your kind support!
I don’t need/want Insiders, I have some life stuff that discourages going to $10, and I already donate $5 to FCC. (Maybe when I get further along, or if/when Insiders offers something I want, I can reconsider)
Suggestions:
So If there’s a way to input $5 somewhere, please show me.
UPDATE/EDIT: Point the “Enjoying Exercism? We need your help to survive…”* link to page that offers you a choice between becoming an Insider, or just making a non-Insider donation… the link iHid provided below…
Add a “Support us” link under the Contribute menu.
Consider adding to Insiders: Team projects.
((I’d pay more for that! Offer simple 2-person projects with a division of labor… then grow it as far as you like… a backend project with someone else doing front-end. Or tracks grow to include Ansible, OpenFAAS, mobile development, partner with OpenMetal for project hosting, etc.))
TL;DR: this idea could be a simple bite-sized feature, or a whole direction of features and tracks…
One more data point: My use of Exercism is very sporadic. That is, I will go weeks/months without doing anything on it, and then I’ll have some free time (or motivation) and will spend some time doing exercises.
The reason this is significant is that I have a huge mental block around paying a monthly subscription for something I don’t use consistently. (This goes for all subscription services, which I guess may explain why I don’t subscribe to a whole lot of things.)
I think what would help would be a more detailed understanding what Exercism needs. “2500 active monthly donors” is a great start and kudos for being so transparent with the funding goals, but for folks who won’t/can’t purchase a recurring subscription, what’s the equivalent? Have you broken out that 2500 number into “people who buy a subscription” and “ad hoc donations”? If so, what does that breakdown look like in terms of people and dollars (pounds)?
Can SOME Concept (Learning) trees could be part of Insiders? Hear me out ( I know the work is open source).
Maybe just “new” Concepts are temporarily behind Insiders, before being rolled out to all users?
or maybe this for “not quite ready” Concepts (beta quality)?
I imagine other benefits: elsewhere I read that authoring Concepts is tedious work, with a lot of files needing to be updated, and requires of developers patience/persistence. (paraphrased)
But it’s also generally true that more people are inspired to fix things once it has users.
And by “more people” I mean both, the the current contributor pushing on the Concept, and potential contributors who find a bug or issue of more limited scope who consider tackling it.
Elsewhere I saw someone Discord post that “Concept work can not be behind a paywall”. To me, paywall has nothing to do with making something freely available. A hybrid model worked for Spotify.
Anyways what I’m trying to say is, if people want to associate user-loved features with recurring donations, the hand-holding that Concepts provided has become my favorite feature.
As this is a brainstorming session, I would like to touch on something controversial. I’ve recently become addicted to a language learning app called Duolingo. I’m still using it for free, but it plays ads for the reason that it “supports Duolingo’s mission”. This statement is compelling. How about introducing ads “to support the mission of Exercism”?
By the way.
I recently tried freeCodeCamp because I wanted to learn HTML and CSS again, but during the course I had to accept several invitations to donate, each lasting about 10 seconds, and it said that donating would allow you not to be interrupted during the lesson, which I found very odd.
I do not mind “second party” advertisements tastefully done on a site or even inside programs done tastefully, and without a network broadcast nature. In other words, advertisements that do not go out to some third party until I decide to go there.
And there is a lot of area for promotions on the website, included, but not limited to, conferences and events pertaining to each language that has them, commercial tooling that is aimed at specific languages, job opportunity advertisements based on specific technologies, etc.
Could you imagine being in a class room and the doors open up during a lecture and Ronald McDonald and The Hamburgler come prancing through with a jingle in the middle of the lecture?
We did start doing this actually a while back. However, it was quite a bit of work to generate interest in advertising, and while we were succeeding, I decided it wasn’t something I wanted to continue to push on as it felt very distracting for me (it involved lots of meetings etc).
Maybe it’s something we should reconsider if things get desperate, but I feel like I can’t see myself enjoying spending time doing that.
Thank you for your reply. I appreciate your detailed discussion of your experience with the introduction of ads and the burden it has placed on you. I understand that managing the ad operations has been distracting and I fully appreciate the frustration you have felt. I will look at ways to ease the financial concerns while ensuring that you enjoy the process.
Hi, I’ve recently joined this platform and I find it to be quite good, intuitive and educative. I still haven’t done much actual learning but time will tell whether I will want to stick with it. But so far it has left a great impression on me.
My personal contribution to the brainstorm would be to suggest - perhaps instead of trying to get more donors to cover the growing costs of infrastructure and maintaining the platform, maybe it should be looked at how it may be possible to cut down on costs? Optimizations, getting more volunteer contributors on board, etc?
The truth is that you can’t just persuade more and more people relative to your total user base to donate. People either are the type of people who want to donate, or they aren’t. The most you can do is to raise awareness of the option to donate (But the way the platform communicates to me makes me think that most users who start using it already quickly become aware of the option to donate, because I sure did), but I don’t think you can convince someone to donate.
As such I think it would be wise look at how many donors you are realistically able to have relative to your total user base, and adapt the platform to only support as many features and content as the expenses covered by donors would allow you to.
Offer simple 2-person projects with a division of labor… then grow it as far as you like… a backend project with someone else doing front-end. Or tracks grow to include Ansible, OpenFAAS, mobile development, partner with OpenMetal for project hosting, etc.))