Can you send me an automated REMINDER PM every month?
- can you send one to ALL members?
Even if you have 34,000 members, how many UNIQUE's do you get each month?
- would a cool analytics tool help motivate members?
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http://siteanalytics.compete.com/vbulletin.com
Forgot to answer those questions
Yes we can send mail to all members. But earning donation money is not our main goal. This will put too much pressure on people to be forced, which is not nice. We hope enough people are willing to pay a bit in helping us survive.
We have indeed 34000 members. But you will be surprised how much actually are donating. Currently (not up-to-date) we have exactly 102 members with a donator tag. I will update this number tonight when I have processed the latest donations.
I am a bit behind with cleaning up donator tags because we don't have a good donators management tool at the moment. The previous tool on vBulletin 3.8 was excellent, but now its 100% manual work. So members donated around oct/nov will still carry the tag for the moment.
On average about 20-40 people are now monthly donating. Donations coming in are ranging from $5 - 10pound. Make the math yourself.
In the past some members paid 15/20 or even more (some much more).
We think 5-10Eur max should be enough. If 25% of our current Racing Club (1588Members) would donate only 1 Eur each month we can cover our expenses. Imo its a shame this is still not possible for most of us.
Imo people are still thinking we could drive Porsches from RD. Actually we are paid 0/nothing. 34000 members and only 102 donators over the last 4 months where some paid more than once.
RD costs are:
- Servers (2 raceservers costing 86eur each per month; 1 dedicated webserver hosting forum/timing/gpcos/downloads/frontpage/etc which cost 106 eur each month)
- Domains (RaceDepartment.com, RaceDept.com, NationGP.com, etc.)
- Licenses (vBulletin and update/support license, vBSeo, GPCos, Server OS
Our total costs are somewhere between 340-360 eur /month.
And to be completely honest, we have exactly 760 euro on RD's bank account (Paypal) which is enough for 2 months breathing space. (next billing date will be in about 2 weeks) When donations were better coming in it was somewhere between 1000-1200 eur on the paypal account. The last 3 months the money flow is decreasing rapidly.
To conclude, many thanks so far for all donations. Hopefully many will follow; As said if 25% of the racingclub (licensed members) would donate 1 eur each month we have a glorious future ahead.
If someone knows a good sponsor, even better! Its a shame such a 'big' site as RD does not attract sponsors themself.
