Original notes from planning the agenda;

Earned income ideas [Philipp/John]

• Present ideas for income
  • Sources of funding
    • Calvert Foundation
  • Donations
  • Offering a service to conference organizers to speak and run workshops on-location to help organize peer learning groups of the face-to-face (citizen circles) or virtual variety to carry on the momentum of a conference (see SoSI session)
  • Pay for private courses
• Biz Model Tools
• Kick the tires
• I've already had some discussions with Philipp around this would like explore these ideas further during the workshop: NS
• Offering to use a recent proposal we have generated for SoSI as a strawman for a discussion either just about SoSI or about P2PU sustainability broadly.  

Small Donations [Philipp]

• What's the right strategy?
• How do we get more small donations from individuals?
• What are realistic goals?
• I've already had some discussions with Philipp around this would like explore these ideas further during the workshop: NS

Workshop Session on Sustainability

• Philipp described the board discussions around sustainability.
• Most interest amongs the board discussions was around small donations.
• Stian liked the kickstarter idea

Small Donations

Example: Citizen Effect: Small donations -> Tipping

Alan: Thinks that the student id card idea might be a great outreach idea.
Citizen Outreach, uses "tipping" rather than "donation"

Who does the money go to? The individual organizer or P2PU? Tipping goes to P2PU.

Concern -> don't violate any social norms of good relationships / don't change social exchange mechanisms to market exchange mechanisms (see Dan Ariely book)


Donations Received:

• John - 50 EUR
• Philipp - 50 EUR
• Niels - 10 EUR
• Nadeem - 50 EUR
• Neeru - 60 USD
• Alan - 5 USD

Scheduling

Yearly campaign or continuous opportunities for small donations?


Donation page

• Make subscription the default, and offer once-off as fall back

Communicate that P2PU is a donation supported project

• Small link in the footer
• Mention in email footers
• Communicate that the community "norm" is to donate

Tied to positive experiences

What are some of the positive experiences to leave donations for?

• Receive a badge
• Add a button on the Learn page
• Anywhere you can submit a feature request
• ? After you sign-up for a course
• ? After you publish a course?
• ? After you finish a task

Tie to small products / gifts

What are some things to tie it to?

• T-shirts
• Student ID

Tie to "things" that the money goes to

• List of potential targets
  • Course / school
  • Particular feature
  • Tie to kickstarter projects
  • Get people who care about the "thing" involved in setting up the kickstarter project
  • Doesn't scale if onus is on P2PU to manage / promote these
  • P2PU encourages community members to start kickstarter projects
    • Communicate that to the community (and provide some support / mechanism)
  • Every time we add a project here, the notification bar at the top shows up at the next time a user logs-in
  • Also feature new good things that happened (so we mix "asking" with "telling about new things")
• Fund a list / portfolio of things that the money will go to
  • Same list as above (but you donate to the whole list instead of individual pieces)
  • Advantage is that if we can't raise the whole amount we loose the money

Make it social

• After you donate, we offer you to promote it (to your friends)
• Tweet - "I donated" - push out to own community
• Show donations from your network

Buy a donation for other people

• Badge (with donation) given to other people

Offer suggestions for donations

• Matching donations
• Show to major gift people

Donation badge/token (icon will be a kidney)

• VERY IMPORTANT -> Not having a badge should not make you look inferior
• Release other contribute badges before donate (so that "donate" doesn't become too important)
• Offer VERY low amounts so that the barrier to participation is very low
• Make showing the badge optional (up to the donor)
• Only show on profile - not all over the page
• Issue to those who already donated
• May have to be a different category (not to confuse with "learning badges") - different color
• Don't like taking away badges
• Badge could be "dated" (to indicate how long ago)
• Badges create transparency
• Donations on other sites don't get you P2PU badges
• We'll put your picture on our home page on your birthday
• You get to decide an April Fool's joke that we play
• We'll stop doing this really annoying thing
• Review on StackOverflow (Philipp)

TODO:

• Develop a donation call message (link to the page that lets them select what they want to fund) (Philipp)

• Building up a community over time
  • People who completed the survey 
  • People who were active on the site in the last 6 months
  • Ask the course organizers for recommendations
  • Call some to "hear their stories" -> input for showcase (get their stories onto the site)
  • Build a relationship step by step
  • How do we track relationships? 
    • CRM?
    • On the site?

Earned Income Opportunities

(1) Private courses

Revenue stream from allowing people to close a course for using at institutuions they can brand it etc. the freemium model.

Creates income, and a gateway experiences into the open world

Are we ideologically opposed to this? Are we happy with this?

Use cases: 

• Campus partners social entrepreneurship 101: Entrepreneurs not comfortable talking about their ventures publicly
• Women entrepeneurs: Not comfortable talking about some privacy issues

(2) Personal learning trainer


(3) Certification related freemiums - Personal review of work


(4) Assessment data

• Optimization of review process of their work (easier to review their work)

(5)  Allow people to charge a premium for tutoring, p2pu takes a cut?

Can we test demand for ideas? i.e.the printing of certificates? is there demand for that?

Calvert Foundation - social investment fund, they provide small business loans to let us try some of these ideas


(6) Monetizing the output from the Lab

Reports of our shared learnings

A conference