Annual prepayment plans (or once-a-week donations are *really* beancounter-unfriendly)

[ribasushi]

As part of the push to get more companies participating in my community an interesting problem popped up. While a CTO or someone equally up-high is really interested in giving back to the people they depend on, the extra weekly lineitem on the company books makes accountants cling to guns and stuff. This makes it a harder sell for a business as a whole, which is problematic.

On the other hand the once-a-week payout is just the right balance for receiver sustainability, so upsetting that would be a step backwards.

Thus the only practical thing to keep everything smooth seems to be an introduction of an account-prepayment service. Gittip already has the infrastructure for this internally, all that would be needed is to expose things for donors-to-be.

A lot of details are up in the air of course:

• Could this encourage fire-and-forget donations undermining the sustainability principle?
• Is going less than annual wise? Perhaps 6/months?
• Is there a legal ramification of becoming an explicit escrow (as opposed to the implicit escrow gittip is today)
• other stuff I can't think of

Thoughts?

Want to back this issue? Post a bounty on it! We accept bounties via Bountysource.

[frioux]

My coworker who is looking into this was saying at the very least monthly would be easier. Quarterly could be nice too. But as you say, yearly is best for a business, where 51*foo doesn't "feel" any less.

[rcross]

+1 - I had to address this issue myself by asking for a manual pre-loading on my account. There was some discussion about making it a bit more self-serve, but I don' think there was a lot of progress.

[chadwhitacre]

★★☆

[chadwhitacre]

This is definitely something I've heard from people inside corps trying to give. It would help us a lot w/ corporate givers. I almost prioritized this as ★★★ and could probably be convinced to do so (would want to review existing ★★★s).

[chadwhitacre]

Folding this into #113.