Hello,
with today’s article, I would like to share some insight on our donations.
As you all likely know, TDF is mostly donation-driven. We receive on average about 9-13 € from individual donors, with the majority using PayPal, followed by Stripe (for credit cards), followed by bank transfers. Cryptocurrency and other payment methods play a minor role. In Italo’s slides, you get an update once per quarter or so on the breakdown of donations.
What many people don’t see, and this is what I want to shed a light on, is the management of these donations, which is handled not by me, but by mostly Stephan, with the help of Sophie, Mike and Italo. This is one of the further “unglamorous” tasks that no one sees, but that can eat up quite some time and are part of the foundation’s daily business.
I can tell, because for the moment, with a staff member being absent, I am stepping in for them, and I see again the amount of messages we receive. 
We receive several hundred donations per day. This Monday is just halfway over here in Germany, and we recieved about 250 donation transaction messages already. Only a small percentage of these actually interact with us, which still adds up. Just over the weekend until now, there are 18 messages that need manual replying to.
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Some people have issues with their credit card being rejected. This is out of our control, as we can’t influence the various security systems payment providers have in place. However, we send a default boilerplate reply.
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Others don’t know what they’ve donated for, even if we have name and URL in the credit card statement, so we patiently explain to them with a boilerplate.
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Some have issues downloading, which is mostly related to their system, but we send a default boilerplate reply to assist them.
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Others are unhappy with the software or don’t need it anymore, and want their money back. While a donation is independent and voluntarily, going through tedious chargeback processes costs us time and money (nowadays 15 € per incident, in the past 40 € per incident), which is why we just refund it.
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Interestingly, several people mistakenly have made a recurring donation and want us to stop this, which we of course do.
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Then there are those who ask for a donation confirmation. Sometimes they miss data, or they made a donation on behalf of their company, which adds additional burden.
Some of the e-mails we receive are nice, some are quite complaining, some threaten us with criminial complaints and/or involving their lawyers - it’s a good representation of society behaviour what we see here.
In the early days, we did not follow-up on refund requests (as a donation is voluntarily). However, this quickly leads to blocking of our account because of too many complaints. Blocking our account stops incoming donations, and the amount of work required to unblock is quite a lot.
We’ve repeatedly reworked our donation website to avoid people doing a recurring donation by mistake, but it seems some percentage of donors always click on the wrong button, so we slowly run out of ideas.
In the end, the management of donations is time well spent, as our constant donation stream gives safety and stability to TDF - but it comes with a lot of work, not seen in public, quite unglamorous, repetetive and administrative, and I would like to thanks those who run this day by day. I’m already stressed out when I have to do a stand-in for some days. 
While you can automate a lot and we do, there is always human interaction which (thankfully) can’t be automated away. And, no, I don’t want to look into an AI chat for this. 
Florian