Hi guys, I hope all of you are very well. I think would be a good idea to include the option of donations of any amount from 1 USD$ and other payment methods for example PayPal. This works very well in others similar platform to iNat but in amateur radio circles for examples. In ham radio we have good experiences capturing founds by this way through our worldwide community over the decades. With this alternative, we have see that more people have the opportunity to contribute with projects during the year. It’s preferable to have even a dollar from a person per month to nothing. Think about it.
I agree that Paypal would be a nice option to have.
For the smaller amounts, my guess is it might not be worth the processing charges. The current lower limit seems to be $5, which is pretty low, but I could see people from countries with less valued currencies wanting to contribute or kids who might be interested in contributing less. Paypal does no fee contributions for some charities I think, so that might be cool to investigate.
If you go to the payment step of the donation process (after the amount and your name & email), you’ll see PayPal and bank transfer are options in addition to credit/debit card donations. I made screen shots so you can see:
We know there are still some countries where these options aren’t enough, but we hope that over time more options will become available.
The minimum is US$5 because of the transaction costs (you can get a sense of what they are for a donation by clicking through the different payment options—bank transfer is the least expensive). Lower minimums also increase the possibility of our donation form being used to test fraudulent/stolen credit cards. We might consider lowering the minimum in the future, but for the time being it is at US$5 for both one-time and recurring donations. It’s good to know it has worked for ham radio circles. Thanks, Rafa!
Can you send a screenshot of the message you see (without revealing any sensitive information) and send it to donations@inaturalist.org? For anyone outside the US encountering payment barriers in the donation process, that will really help us with troubleshooting to see the message you encounter in context. For example, there may be a setting in PayPal or Stripe that we can change to reduce these barriers, or it may be something unfortunately out of our control.
Edited to add:
Please be sure to also include:
The country your card or account is from.
The country of the billing address associated with the account.
If these two are not the same, the likelihood of validation errors is extremely high and we’ll need that information to troubleshoot.
