On 03/01/2021 22:23, Mark Murphy wrote:
I¡¯m proposing this topic for members to share suggestions with the wider forum here. I suggest we concentrate on practical methods owners and members could use.
I'd like to comment on the practical side of things. Let's accept that this pricing change means that most groups that choose to use Groups.io will eventually become paying groups, and therefore their founders have to consider this pretty much from the beginning of the group's running.
(Perhaps GMF should make this clear as a best practise: if you don't intend to convert to a paying group, and you expect that your group might exceed 75 members at some time, rather go with Google Groups.)
$220 per year is for a premium group of any size (including 20, 50 or 100 members), but a prudent group owner might decide to upgrade by the time his group has about 75 members. And although $220 equates to 55c per member if you have 400 members or more, $220 is more like $2.50 per member by the time the group decides to upgrade.
A good idea would be to charge your members $2.50 per year from the start. This would help grow a bit of a buffer initially and it would help users get into the habit of paying for the subscription.
However, one must not forget that members who do not pay can also contribute to the group in various ways (even if they never post anything, their presence has a positive effect.) For this reason I think it may be better for many types of groups that some members subsidize others. In other words, some members will be paying e.g. $5 per year and others will be allowed to pay nothing.
This is great in theory, but the problem becomes: how to convince paying members that it's worth paying. Not all group owners would want to spend their time figuring out ways to come up with special content that paying members may be willing to pay for. The ideal, I think, is that paying members pay voluntarily (for the good of the group), but not all paying members may be willing to do that indefinitely.
One tactic may be to state that long-time members should pay, while members who have only recently joined are allowed to participate for free. In other words, if you discover after a year or two that you like being a member of the group, then you must start paying for it.
Precisely how the donations or subscriptions are gathered would be up to the group owner and members. Ideally, the group owner would figure out a number of ways of accepting payments (add this to the GMF wiki) and then just accept payments like that. PayPal, Stripe, direct transfer, coupons (you know, the type that scammers use) etc.
Something else is important: how to ensure that donations are safe from dishonest group owners. And: what are the tax implications for group owners to be sitting on a bunch of money for a number of years until the group goes premium.
Samuel
Samuel Murray