Hi Guys, sorry I havent replied.
£1000/yr is just a target Ive set for this first round of fund raising. I'd love to make more. The cost of running the website/forum grows with the amount of extra services we can adopt. We are a not-for-profit organisation so any money we make gets re-invested into HAVOCA. It isnt a single bill, it gets paid in stages for all the different types of fees we are charged. There is a post about it somewhere, I'll try and dig it out. Last accounts post (2019) is
here. I'd also love to be in a position where we have a slush fund to account for additional work that may need to be done around upgrades and crashes. Call it a security net!
The amounts arent 'whole numbers' because paypal take their fees. So if you donate £10, HAVOCA only receives £9.66. Hence why the total goes up in increments rather than in whole numbers.
The amount isn't in an interest gathering account. Paypal doesnt work like that.
The monthly subscriptions (which we are hugely grateful for) cant be part of the 'bar' because the donation bar addition is only wired into the forum database. If you have set up a monthly donation, this goes straight into the paypal account rather than via the forums database. Ive deliberately kept the various ways of donating as people have different reasons for donating and the more ways we can offer provides us with a bigger pool of potential donors.
I havent decided whether to reset the target each year or perhaps just keep a running total for members to see how much they have donated. I'm open to suggestions.
Some examples of this years costs (unplanned!) on top of those we expected - Newsletter plugin became unsupported and required a new system - this costs £89/year and a one-off payment of £399 to install - the latter is mainly a developer's time. This can vary depending on the problems they face once they start work. Fortunately we have a well trusted team of developers who do much of the work on a voluntary basis. I also like to dabble but some things are beyond me and hence why I need a professional to help.
The spam software is consistently troublesome and regularly costs money to sort out. This is a well known problem in the industry and unless you want to pay £1000s on a system that constantly monitors the traffic you have to make do with a cheaper solution that isnt as robust. It really is a minefield!
Anyway, having said all of that, our losses are covered by donations from the team. My aspiration is not to make any losses and continue to expand the services and the quality of the services we are able to provide.
