While donations and support are always welcome on Joplin but how about launching a short campaign this year? Gently remining users that it is community driven and their support is needed for futher development?
If it proves successful, we could make it an annual event.
Goals:
Collect donations.
Raise awareness that the project is ongoing and remind that is community-driven.
Encourage and remind people of other ways to support the project, as outlined at Joplin’s donation page. This includes rating the app on app stores, voting, and more.
Managing Donations
It's always more motivating for donors if they can direct and manage how their contributions are used.
To this end, I propose introducing a governance program where the community can vote on how to allocate the funds raised—whether in full or in part. Let’s decide this together.
Why is this important?
Encouraging feedback: Regular users will be inspired to provide input on the features and improvements they want, fostering active and valuable feedback. What more could a community project wish for?
Strengthening connection: Donors will feel more engaged, knowing their contributions influence project development. They won’t just donate silently—they’ll actively participate in decision-making.
Incentivising developers: Financial rewards for developers can motivate them to put in extra effort, ensuring high-quality results while reinforcing their contributions.
How to ask users for donation?
Any thoughts or ideas? How about introducing a one-time popup window in the app to announce the campaign? Later, we could follow up with a popup showing the campaign results (report) with voting start, and then the outcomes of the voting. These there popups could be scheduled throughout the year in a non-intrusive manner—what do you think?
I am not a devloper, I am not a member of the Joplin team, I am just another user responding to a post asking the community "what do you think?"
Personally I would prefer @laurent to use any funds sent to him as he sees fit to address whatever issues he faces in keeping Joplin going. I cannot see why he would want to surrender control of his project.
But they already do both here and on GitHub.
I donate every month through Patreon and I also make suggestions on this forum. There is no link between the two activities. I can do either, both or none. For Donors to feel more engaged would there be link between donations and "having a say"? Should a donor's vote be weighted according to the amount donated?
It's not just paying for things it's also about maintaining those things afterwards.
What I think is that the introduction of begging pop-ups in the app along with other pop-ups "throughout the year" is possibly the best way to pi$$ off the user base. And a "non-intrusive" pop-up? That's an oxymoron. Their very purpose is to get people's attention. Think, Wikipedia for a couple of months of every year....
In short, whilst I admire @AlexLegion's keenness for Joplin to succeed, unless Joplin is in a very desperate need for money to survive, I can see something like this having quite the opposite effect.