The Hearts Fund Drive is going great, BUT........

[EarlG]

...I would be remiss in my duties as a fundraiser if I didn't ask you to kick it up a notch!

As global ad rates continue to lag, voluntary member payments have become an increasingly important source of revenue for independent sites like DU. This means that the three fundraisers in February, May, and August really are our best revenue-raising weeks of the year, and they pretty much see us through from year to year.

If you have it within your means to kick in a few extra bucks before Valentine's Day on Saturday, or by the end of the fund drive on Sunday, we sure would appreciate it -- and even though it gets harder to find folks who don't have any hearts as the week goes on, I think you'd agree that getting and giving hearts during Hearts Week never really gets old, no matter how many times you do it.

And so, speaking of kicking in extra bucks, I have some news..................

DU IS NOW TESTING STAR MEMBERSHIP PAYMENTS VIA STRIPE

It seems that PayPal is making it increasingly annoying to purchase or renew a Star Membership without creating an account, and every year I get more requests to add a new payment system. You should be aware that the work involved in this is complicated, which is why we've been putting it off.

But this week I started to investigate other ways to take payments, and I decided to try out Stripe. Their service allows you to make payments directly to DU without having to go anywhere near PayPal. You can use credit, debit, and other forms of payment such as Apple Pay, Google Pay, etc.

I set up a payment page, which you can try out right here by clicking this link:

https://buy.stripe.com/bJe14he2q1B81qj3e9bwk01

Making a payment on that page will appear as a charge to DEMU STAR on your card statement. You'll receive hearts, and your Star Membership expiration date will be extended to one year from the date you make the payment.

Here's the catch though -- with DU's current payment system, it knows your username, and can automatically update your Star Membership. Getting all that automatic stuff working is the hard part of integrating a new payment system into DU, which means that none of it is working with Stripe payments yet.

So right now, there are a few things to note:

• Using this payment system will not automatically update your account. I'll have to do it manually, which means there will be a delay before your Star Membership is updated. (Note that updates will be quicker during US east coast business hours.) On the payment form, there is a field for your DU username. Please enter your username ACCURATELY, so that I can find your account quickly.


• If you use this payment system before the end of the fund drive, you will get hearts to give out (one heart per dollar). Hearts will be assigned at the same time that Star Memberships are manually updated, so again, please note that there might be a delay.


• This can only be used to make one-time payments. We're not testing it for recurring subscriptions yet. Please note that if you already have a monthly or yearly recurring payment to DU set up, making a payment via Stripe will not affect that payment in any way -- it will continue to recur as normal.


• Bear in mind that this is a test. You should have no issues making payments, but I may have to shut the link down at some point in order to make sure I'm collecting bookkeeping data correctly, or for other test purposes. If this is a success, we'll work on integrating it so that your Star Memberships are updated automatically. But if there are bookkeeping or integration issues, we'll have to consider a different solution.

If you don't want to make a payment through the new Stripe page, then the current system is still working just fine, and will update your account automatically as usual.

Thank you so much to everyone who has helped to make this a successful fund drive so far -- with a few days left, I hope we can keep going all the way to the end!