Feedback from Hope Leman
Received in email, posted with permission
Hi, Chad. These are just my reactions as someone very interested in crowdfunding. I am going to refer quite a bit to Kickstarter in these jottings because that is the only crowdfunding site I use and it is the one I know the most about.
I came various mentions of Gittip in Twitter and looked it over a few times but left the page without delving further because I did not “git” the concept right away.
For me, part of the problem is that it appears to be a crowdfunding site but does not immediately identify itself as such and I found that confusing.
It says on the homepage, “A Weekly Gift Exchange.” But to me a “gift exchange” is what my family members and I do on Christmas Day. I don’t think of crowdfunding as a gift exchange. I think of it as financially supporting projects I find worthwhile or as a way of helping along promising, appealing people. I don’t really expect a gift in return (save in the abstract sense of hoping the people I am backing will contribute to a more beautiful, more just, etc. world).
Maybe you have some philosophical objection to the word “Crowdfunding,” I don’t know. But I think it would help make clear in the first few seconds to new visitors what Gittip is. “A Weekly Gift Exchange” does not make that clear. I typed in my Twitter handle as a way to check out Gittip and on that page saw this wording,
“What is Gittip?
Gittip is a way to thank and support your favorite artists, musicians, writers, programmers, etc. by setting up a small weekly cash gift to them.” I would definitely put that wording or an abbreviated version of it on the home page.” Also, I would not use “exchange” because a gift is not always an exchange. On Kickstarter, for example, I almost always check “No reward.” I just want to support something. Indeed, a gift in return is sometimes more on a bother and an entanglement than just a cash gift to a project.
I don’t really get why you don’t simply add the word “crowdfunding” here, “Gittip is a platform for inspiring generosity through weekly cash gifts.”
It is a crowdfunding platform. Why not just say so? You say so here, after all.
“What is Gittip?
Gittip is a platform for sustainable crowd-funding. Use it to set up a 25¢ per week (or more) anonymous gift to someone you think does great work.
https://www.gittip.com/about/faq.html
Again, I would put the word “crowdfunding” front and center on the home page. “Gift exchange” sounds too girly and is not even accurate. Gittip is a crowdfunding site.
I would also put the part about 25¢ per week on the homepage. That appeals to me—small amounts seem less scary and I like Kickstarter because I can pledge as little as $1 per project.
I did like the nice clean look of the site. (I find Indiegogo’s interface junky and confusing, for instance.)
But some things, again, I don’t “git.” I have just been clicking around in Gittip and clicked on your profile and I don’t really get what the “Horn” feature is. I don’t, that is, get what makes it different from a “Statement.” Is the Horn like a mini-blog? Apparently not, as the entries are not dated. And you can’t tweet each new entry on the Horn page, so the toots seem of little utility vis-à-vis dissemination of news from each member’s activities. I think you need to explain on the Gittip site what the Horn feature is and how to use it—maybe a screencast would help there. I looked at this horn
https://www.gittip.com/MaxCDN/horn/
and that was a “toot” about MaxCDN rather than by it. Thus, I take it that the Horn functions as any mention of a member of Gittip by that member or any other member. Again, that feature needs some explaining to users. For example, who is the “me” here?
https://www.gittip.com/heroku/horn/
- Thank for your services!
- Thank for your services!
- I can’t thank you enough for what you’re doing to make Gittip happen. It means a lot to me.
I presume it is you, Chad. Again, can any member of Gittip toot or are you, Chad, the only one who can toot?
A screencast would also help make clear how “Communities” work. For instance, I wondered what would happen if I joined the Gittip community
https://www.gittip.com/for/gittip/
but there was no screencast to tell me what would if I did and when I looked over communities I could not tell what happens in them without, apparently, joining one and I was reluctant to join one without some idea first of what happens in them. For example, I looked at the one here:
Python
429 members
Sign in using Twitter or GitHub or Bitbucket to
join the Python community on Gittip.
But, again, I did not want to sign in unless I had a better idea of what I was getting into. As a “lurker” it seems to me that you need to increase the comfort level of visitors to the site by enabling them to get a better feel for what Gittip is without making them sign in to determine that. I am wary of joining anything on the Web without a better handle of what is what. That is where screencasts or intro videos come in.
Hoping for more info I looked over the “About” page
and found some of the info confusing. For example, “the maximum gift from one person to another is $24.” That is per week, right? So that is quite a bit per year, right?
I found this confusing, too, “Gifts come out of your current balance (the money people have given to you), and if that’s not enough, Gittip can charge your credit card to make up the difference.” It is not clear if I can join without also seeking gifts for myself. I presume so, but this wording I found hard to follow. It says on this page
https://www.gittip.com/about/faq.html
“I don’t want to receive tips, I just want to give them. What should I do?
Please select “I’m here as a patron.” as your personal funding goal. We won’t show gift buttons to others on your profile.
You probably should consolidate all the info about being a patron onto one page and make it clearer how to become a patron. Also, I don’t get why you say this, “Please select “I’m here as a patron.” as your personal funding goal. We won’t show gift buttons to others on your profile.” Why not—part of the fun of being a backer, for instance, on Kickstarter, is showing what you back. It shows what you are interested in, what you think is worth backing and helps the projects by giving them some additional visibility.
Indeed, I found the financial set-up not clear enough for my quite cautious nature. Just as well say that so you get a better understanding of the mindset of people who are very interested in the Gittip concept but who are wary of not venturing out of the confidence-inducing cocoon of our Amazon accounts on Kickstarter. And indeed, alas, the idea of getting involved with a project in an ongoing weekly basis makes me nervous. That is a big commitment and I admire you for trying it, but it does tend to lock in a person’s funds in a way that Kickstarter does not. With Kickstarter, I can support a host of projects in many fields and not feel tied down to any one person or project. Of course, I get that the whole point of Gittip is to provide sustainability. Still, it would be nice if there were some way not to have to get sucked into subsidizing long-term things on Gittip. You would have to have a pretty secure income to be able to practice philanthropy on that level. I was interested to see that
https://www.gittip.com/readthedocs/
has surpassed his/her funding goal, “Funding Goal
My goal is to receive $100.00 per week on Gittip.”
That is the kind of thing I would expect to be reflected in a “toot” but is not. I think that the sense of “participatory innovation” that is conveyed so well on some Kickstarter pages (notably that for Memoto
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/martinkallstrom/memoto-lifelogging-camera/posts
is lacking on Gittip (maybe it is there in the communities, but I can’t determine that until I sign in and join one and I don’t want to unless I can watch a video or a screencast first, as I have said above).
That is, if I am being asked to support someone on a weekly basis, I need to feel more a personal connection than I get by looking over what is linked to on the Web (Twitter accounts, Web sites, etc.) from Gittip. Gittip would have to be more of a hub and the Horn would have to have the bubbling enthusiasm of Memoto or straightforward updates of
Ghost: Just a Blogging Platform
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/johnonolan/ghost-just-a-blogging-platform/posts
I also don’t get what each person supports on Gittip. Just as an example, this person
https://www.gittip.com/carlzulauf/
gives “$5.00 per week” but I am not sure what for. Part of why I like Kickstarter is that I can track my own development as a crowdfunder on my page
http://www.kickstarter.com/profile/hopeleman
and refer other people easily via that page to projects I have backed by sending them a link to the page of a project I have backed. I can also easily email questions to projects I am leaning toward backing and I can easily tweet a link to a project I am backing or thinking of backing or just want others in Twitter to know about. I would suggest making Gittip way more Twitter-friendly—each toot of a Horn, for example, should have a “Tweet this” button (if they are going to be, that is, blog-post-like). Also, if I were to become a backer of something on Gittip I would want to be able to tweet “I just backed…” so as to help raise the visibility of the project and to show my support for it. (But I would not want the exact amount I pledged to each project known—or even the total amount I have pledged—I think there is value in keeping such things private.)
Any progress on the one-off matter?
https://github.com/gittip/www.gittip.com/issues/5
Also, I would suggest sticking with one word for what each gift is rather than shifting between the word “gift” and “tip.” You use “tip” here:
https://www.gittip.com/about/faq.html
And this member uses both words:
https://www.gittip.com/JSFiddle/
I would also suggest adding “Tweet this” buttons to each post on your blog.
By the way, this is a rather strange philosophy, “Don’t compensate employees.” Then they are not employees, as far as I can tell. You can call that a company if you like, but it is no company I have ever heard of. By that standard, a cotton plantation in the Old South was a “company.”
Site navigation issue: you need a “home” button—I am trying to get to the homepage right now and can’t find it. (Found it at last by clicking on the Gittip icon—but have liked a “home” link, too).
One major problem is that it takes a long time to determine whom one might be interested in backing. For example, I may know the Twitter handle of someone I admire, but it would take a lot of work in Twitter (if I even know what their Twitter handle is) and copying and pasting that info into the box on Gittip to find out if they are members and thus someone I can back on it.
Who inspires you?
Enter a username:
Or browse communities on Gittip …
And again I can’t browse communities (and thereby find people I might be interested in backing) unless, apparently, I join every single one simply in order to determine if there are promising people or worthwhile organizations in those communities I might be interested in backing. For all your commitment to openness, Gittip requires way too much commitment upfront to really gain traction by interesting people like me (not that I am so important, but I am fairly representative of the small-time backers that would enable Gittip to really take off). On Kickstarter, it is very easy without any preliminary buy-in to browse “Recently launched” projects or to explore by category, cities, tags, etc. Gittip needs that sort of discoverability and not put up the “join” roadblock. If I can’t check things out without joining first, I leave a site.
It is true, that I can get some idea of the membership of each community by glancing over a page about it:
https://www.gittip.com/for/javascript/
and maybe clicking on the profile of the members that happen to be featured on that page, but that still does not reveal much about the specific community. And there is not much incentivizing for joining a community. There needs to be way more info about each on before you can entice someone to take a chance on joining it. I don’t join things lightly, for instance, and am leery of screwing up my Twitter account. Say I was moderately interested in joining this community (and the dropdown is rather ill-organized—sort of semi-alphabetized):
https://www.gittip.com/for/open-data/
There is just not info to suck me into it.
This,
Can I use Gittip to support organizations?
Yes. Some accounts on Gittip represent organizations.
needs to be far more detailed in order to attract greater interest among the nonprofit community and backers of such. Can 501 (c) organizations raise money on Gittip, for example? What do you mean by organizations? You should provide links to examples on Gittip.
All in all, I very much admire what you are doing. But I think more needs to be done to increase the overall “comfort level” and sexiness of the projects. The beauty of Kickstarter is that I can quickly watch a video and scan a write-up of a project. On Gittip, by contrast, as admirable as the people I could back may be and as worthwhile and importantly innovative as their projects may be, I still have to invest a great deal of time by clicking and visiting other sites to learn about each person and their endeavors. On Kickstarter, everything is offered to me on a single page and that enables me to make a quick decision. “Cool video. Good person. Good project. I’ll back it. Bang. Amazon. Done.” My reaction to Gittip, “All those people—so many people. So many Twitter accounts to look at. So many Web pages (so many formats!) to look at. No video. And I seem to have to do something or other about a bank account. I am sooo tired right now…”
I know you may not be into slick or into Amazon. But it gets the money to the projects.
Hope this helps—you are a really neat guy doing really neat stuff. I loved the way you really irked the arrogant guys at TechCrunch.
