Recurring Donations

[morisy]

Users should be allowed to set up recurring donations for some sorts of transactions; since all campaigns are currently time limited this is a bit down the road.

[allanlasser]

Would these be recurring donations to projects? Would they ever expire? Should we notify somebody before their payment recurs and offer them a way to cancel?

[morisy]

• Yes
• They would expire when the crowfunding campaign is ended, or if the user cancels.
• No, two emails per donation seems excessive, just a receipt when they're charged and our usual refund policy should cover.
• The implied work of a recurring payment management feature is there and involves a bit of complexity so we can let this simmer a bit.

[allanlasser]

Some more questions after rediscovering this issue:

1. Would this be a predefined amount or a user-defined amount?
2. Why tie this to crowdfunding? Should I be able to support a project that has no active crowdfunds?
3. Who would use this feature, and how would we encourage people to use it?

I can see a use case for "support this project for $10 a month," but I don't see why this necessarily needs to be tied to crowdfunding or another existing payment method.

[morisy]

1. User defined.
2. Sometimes (more than you'd think) people don't want money. I think recurring FOI request donations would be cool, but we haven't seen much uptake there (not necessarily because it's not a good idea, I think there's still potential but we just haven't reached it yet) so it makes sense to tie this to the feature we have seen a fair amount of success.
3. Currently people who support projects, but want to make an ongoing contribution. It's tied to crowdfunds because I think the ask and expectations should be specifically crafted if someone is going to ask for money. And those expectations can be minimally set (i.e., not promising to do a set number of stories, but just saying more money will help add reporting), but I think having it be clear what people are supporting helps avoid confusion/resentment and keeps everyone on the same page. Crowdfunds are currently are way of designating that relationship.

[morisy]

Had a user ask about this feature today, so adding some more thoughts plus that it should be implemented on /donate as well as projects:

There's a few tricky aspects:

• Do they need a login to manage?
• Where can they cancel?
• It doesn't make sense to add to projects until we have projects without a deadline