Asking your community for money

Status: placeholder. This guide will be written before launch.

Pavillion's funding model is public radio, not SaaS. The software supports voluntary contributions; the harder part is asking for them in a way that fits an anti-extractive community-funded platform. This guide is the organizer-judgment side of funding plan setup.

Planned scope

• Why ask at all: hosting, storage, your time, the infrastructure that lets people find each other's events. Naming this honestly does more for contributions than vagueness does
• When to ask: not at signup (the "no friction to public access" promise is the whole point), not as a paywall, but at moments when the value is visible and the contribution is in proportion
• How often: regular enough that contributions feel like part of how the instance runs, infrequent enough that nobody feels harassed. A drive a year is plausible; a banner that never goes away isn't
• How transparent: publishing what it costs to run the instance, where the contributions go, what shortfall looks like. Public radio publishes its numbers, and that's why people contribute
• The voice question: warmth, not desperation; gratitude, not entitlement; honesty about what contributions buy (continued operation) and what they don't (special treatment, more features, anything that resembles a tier)
• The "what if I want to require contributions" question — you can't, and not just because the software won't let you. The free-public-access posture is a load-bearing wall in Pavillion's mission; removing it changes what the instance is
• A short list of don'ts, with reasons: don't gate features behind contributions, don't email people who contributed once asking for more, don't hide the "no thanks" option, don't sell the contribution as anything other than what it is