I really love the moon this month, and I will surely donate for it. The bird headdress looks really nice, too, but I haven't quite made up my mind about whether I'd really use it yet. It does give of a vibe more like the old queen's items though, so I think you did a fantastic job capturing that feeling, Firn!

Which does bring me to the point that made me want to post here now:
I'm wondering how the donations have changed with the perk items. Are fewer users donating or are the regular donators keeping to a lower tier where they might previously have gone all out for the queen's item?
Because I'm catching myself thinking like "Hm, I really like the third item, not so sure about the highest one. If I donate now, should I donate for all or just up to the third? That way I'll be able to donate again sooner, in case something nice comes up in the next months..."
Which might lead to lower donations if that is not just me. I'm not saying it necessarily leads to less money being spent - my thinking goes more in a "I'll donate less each months, but more often" direction, because I don't have to go all out to the top item to get some sweet extra reward on top of my FC.
That might actually be good, if it leads to a more stable influx of donations, but I don't know if it really does.

Yeah, I'm not entirely sure where I'm going with this, but just in case people are donating lower amounts, I wanted to give the reasoning I have for it, in the hope that it might be useful somehow.

Donations have drastically gone down actually - but whether that really has much to do with the donation perks or not is hard to say, because from what I can tell the strongest relation is between donations and how many users are online - naturally, because if 100 users are online there are 100 potential donators and if only 10 users are online there are only 10 potential donators. So the less active users we have the less donations we get and how big a role the donation perks play in this is hard to say for me.

Of course, that correlation makes a lot of sense.
I was just wondering whether you observed the number of people donating going down or rather the amount each person donates. That would both lead to problems with too little money coming in, but it might be useful to examine what is happening in detail to figure out what can be done about it.

Chrizine wrote: I was just wondering whether you observed the number of people donating going down or rather the amount each person donates.

Ah, I did not understand that correctly.That's actually an interesting question. I would need to look at all the donations from a few months before the introduction of donation perks and then on a few months of donations with donation perks and compare the data to make an accurate statement here.

Off the top of my head and without varifying this with data I would say that not much has changed. For as long as I can remember there are always a few members who donate larger sums each month and these have always been the very same users for as long as I remember. It rarely happens that I see, for example, a user donating for 20 FC at once who has not donated before or only donated smaller sums before. I don't feel like there has been any change it smaller donations vs bigger donation ration.

Hm, I see. Sounds like it's more likely that just the number of donors is going down, if you haven't really noticed any change in the amounts. That fits with your observation that the key point is the number of active users and following from that the number of people donating.
Might still be interesting to look at your data more closely though, since it could be not so noticeable if the top donors don't change their behaviour even if a lot of the smaller donors do.

This reminded me to donate, I was supposed to do it earlier x.x

I'm still battling whether I should go for the Moon item, because it's pretty and I might not get a chance at it on the market, but on the other hand, it's a lot of money for me I'd have to promise myself to not donate 2 months in a row to compensate the "money loss" (can't think of anything positive instead of that).

Suugar-Fiend wrote:

I like the coin badge as well. It suddenly appeared one day and I was like "huh, wonder what that is". I still wonder what the psychology behind it is, or if it's just meant to be another pretty incentive thing for donators.
I kept wondering if donators wanted to be singled out, but no one seems to be very bothered by it and feel like its been taken as a "kofk secret club badge" lol.

Actually, that was exactly my reaction - but I guess the KofK community overall is cool with it, so it seems fine. I was worried at first that it might become like a sign that you can afford getting stuff by yourself so you'd be excluded from charities, raffles, FC sellers and the like if you had the badge, but I haven't seen that happening. (I don't think that would be a good thing, simply because I think that would discourage people from donating if they could only donate a little and really were still dependant on buying or winning FC from others to get all the sets they want.)
But it seems the community is taking it in a good way, as a "yay, that person supported the site!" sign, and that's nice to see :)

I'm pretty sure the badge is for donating anything at all. Otherwise it wouldn't be fair, people who can't afford 5 coins at once would feel like "hey, I donated as much as I could, I want a thank-you badge as well D:"
You donated so you get a badge, but the amount you donated is gratified with the certain perks attached. So I guess the badge is for everyone
At least that's what I think, Firn can always correct me

At first I was a bit scared about what people's reactions would be and I was afraid this would divide the community in two groups. But so far it's fine and if it stays that way it might even help with small donations People see shiny, people want shiny XD
I cross my heart for that.