I wish they would of just linked to this site. as a side note, I hate slides because I have no idea of the slides context in the presentation. Usually during a presentation, a slide is only complementary to what the actual presenter is saying, so why present just the slides. Also google indexes slides so high in search. I've never found a any good content out of just slides.
Well, browsers have prevented that for years. More to the point, whatever evils UI design is capable of are certainly being committed by that catastrophically disarrayed mess of a website. Maybe a few more irrelevant widgets, tactically-place banners, out-of-sync but identical flash movie ads, and thumbnail-jammed iframes would do the trick...?
The opt-in is for an extra 15% of your donation to be "optionally" donated to the charity. Because it is "optional", this 15% doesn't count towards the official "% of donations used for operating expenses" metric used to gauge charities, of course.
It's going to get their merchant account blocked if and when it reaches the card companies.
Such 'stuffing' of charges is a long time trick used to push the total charge volume so the chargebacks are reduced. Nobody is going to charge back $15 sent to charity.
So 200 charges at 150, 2% chargeback rate, vs 400 charges, 200@135 and 200@15, 1% chargeback rate.
Some billing companies that have since gone under used to do this with a 1$ charge added to every sale.
This practice has been banned for years and I'm quite surprised to see it revive.
Hi. I work at DonorsChoose.org (as a programmer). Since I'm not an accountant I'm not entirely sure what point you're trying to make here, unless it is to suggest that in some way DonorsChoose.org is misrepresenting its finances to the world --- which we absolutely do not do. All the financial reports I've ever seen are quite clear about where the money from donors goes, how much of it goes towards operating expenses and how much goes directly to the recipients of aid. In what way does making the operational expense donation optional affect anything having to do with reporting of these numbers?
The reason DonorsChoose makes operational expense donations optional is simply to give donors a choice. They can choose to donate all their money directly to the teachers and students, or they can choose to donate part of the money to fund overhead. If they choose the former, all of the money goes to purchase materials, and all DonorsChoose overhead is drawn down from our general fund (which is currently funded from private donations and corporate donors, etc.) If they choose the latter, a portion of their donation goes towards overhead. In fact, we only currently cover about 40% of our operating expenses from the optional donation; we rely on external donations to cover the rest, but our goal is to reach breakeven (and we are on course to do so, as I understand it).
There's no sense in which the "official" "% of donations used for operating expenses" figure is fudged at all. The optional donation is precisely as described, and it's simply to give the donor choice, pure and simple.
[+] [-] qeorge|15 years ago|reply
http://darkpatterns.org/
[+] [-] minalecs|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sudonim|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jamesbritt|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] muhfuhkuh|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mynameishere|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] andreyf|15 years ago|reply
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/404957/donorschoose.png
The opt-in is for an extra 15% of your donation to be "optionally" donated to the charity. Because it is "optional", this 15% doesn't count towards the official "% of donations used for operating expenses" metric used to gauge charities, of course.
[+] [-] jacquesm|15 years ago|reply
Such 'stuffing' of charges is a long time trick used to push the total charge volume so the chargebacks are reduced. Nobody is going to charge back $15 sent to charity.
So 200 charges at 150, 2% chargeback rate, vs 400 charges, 200@135 and 200@15, 1% chargeback rate.
Some billing companies that have since gone under used to do this with a 1$ charge added to every sale.
This practice has been banned for years and I'm quite surprised to see it revive.
[+] [-] syntheticzero|15 years ago|reply
The reason DonorsChoose makes operational expense donations optional is simply to give donors a choice. They can choose to donate all their money directly to the teachers and students, or they can choose to donate part of the money to fund overhead. If they choose the former, all of the money goes to purchase materials, and all DonorsChoose overhead is drawn down from our general fund (which is currently funded from private donations and corporate donors, etc.) If they choose the latter, a portion of their donation goes towards overhead. In fact, we only currently cover about 40% of our operating expenses from the optional donation; we rely on external donations to cover the rest, but our goal is to reach breakeven (and we are on course to do so, as I understand it).
There's no sense in which the "official" "% of donations used for operating expenses" figure is fudged at all. The optional donation is precisely as described, and it's simply to give the donor choice, pure and simple.
[+] [-] TamDenholm|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kbatten|15 years ago|reply