RFC: How does Rewarding people work?

[zspencer]

One of the things we haven't really thought through/designed/etc. yet is what kinds of rewards we
want to offer and why.

We have some vague feels re:

1. Rewards probably should be digital in nature, so we don't have to deal with things like VAT or other sales taxes
2. Rewards probably should be fulfillable automatically. I.e. The Project Team shouldn't have to spend time/attention fulfilling rewards
3. Rewards should be expire-able with some automatic criterion (Oh you haven't paid in the last 30 days, your access to our members only forum is revoked!)

Further, from my conversations with people in our target (people who rely on crowd-funding in lieu of or in addition to advertising, one-off or subscription sales of digital goods or access to digital areas) there are some serious pain points with existing crowd-funding models:

1. The expectation of additional labor beyond what you're doing already. "Backer only updates" for instance, are a huge time and attention sink and making that an implicit expectation can dissuade project creators from opening an account; because why sign up for more under-paid labor?
2. Lack of ownership of "the list" of past/current supporters and what tier they're at. This makes it tough to do up-sells; or targeted marketing for people who have "dropped out" of supporting.

I'm not really sure how this all ties into rewards beyond for now I think a reasonable way to approach it is:

1. A Project can Have Many Reward Providers. Say, slack, wordpress, etsy, etc.
2. The Available Rewards for a given provider should be set up by us, though we may "pull" data from the RewardProvider to inform that (for instance, when setting up wordpress, we may ask you to choose an existing user group to add supporters to, or we can create one for you. For slack, we may ask you to select whether they are full users or restricted users, and if so, which channels they should have access to.)
3. Available Rewards may be grouped by Support Tier, which has a Minimum Amount and a Frequency. I'm leaning towards symbols for that (never, weekly, monthly, quarterly, annually) instead of a number of days.
4. For now, project creators must make relationships like "You get these PLUS these when you do higher tiers" by defining a relationship between the Available Rewards and the Support Tier

Does this sound like a reasonable mechanism for now?

[zspencer]

@atav1k @bhaibel @emdashbuck @jtu0 @jalcine ^^^

[jtu0]

I like what you've spelled out here. From my limited discussions, the MVP case I see is for a WP subscribers-only site, any level.

I'll defer to Vikram's research for what the next priority after that should be (and hopefully feedback from adopters).