freelawproject/free.law

Switch to a membership model for services

Closed this issue · 4 comments

mlissner commented

The state of play

Right now we have a couple features where you have to be a donor to use them:

  • Real time search alerts are only provided if you donate at least $10/year.

  • You get 5 docket alerts for free (or 15 if you install RECAP). If you donate $5/month you get unlimited alerts.

Other than that, I think everything is free (though we try to get API users to license things).

How it'd feel as a user

In general, I think this should be a good change to make and a good re-framing for our users:

  • If you're a member you get some benefits.
  • If you're not a member you can still use practically everything.
  • If you don't want the benefits, you can still be a member.
  • If an organization wants to do corporate sponsorships, we can give their employees membership benefits.

Tiers?

We can make this change without clawing back anything above by having tiers and making the lowest tier $5/month.

Non-members get:

  • 5 docket alerts (or 15 if install RECAP).
  • Unlimited daily search alerts
  • No real time search alerts

$5/month tier 1 members get:

  • Unlimited docket alerts (currently costs $5/month, so this works well)
  • Unlimited real time search alerts (currently costs $10/year)
  • Stickers and a thank you note?

$10/month tier 2 members get the above, plus:

  • T-Shirt

$25/month tier 3 members get the above, plus:

  • Hoodie

Tiers 4, 5, and 6 don't include any more schwag, but they could be $50/month, $100/month, and $500/month.

Other benefits?

I'm not sure how this will fit together with our bots.law or planned x-ray/clio integrations. Do members get discounts? Do users of Slack integration become defacto members? This will need to be sorted out.

Taxes?

I'm checking with our tax preparer if doing memberships come with any tricky tax things we should know.

Looking at other orgs

Looking around:

  • EFF's membership page has the tiers above and similar schwag.

  • ACLU also lets you be a member, has no tiers (you can pay various amounts though), and gives no schwag or benefits.

  • AALL has a bunch of membership things, some of which they imply are part of the membership, but aren't, like the conference, I think. They have three tiers (four if you include their reduced rate for recently unemployed):

    image

  • Investigative Reporters and Editors (IRE) provides five tiers at 1-4 years and roughly $60-70/year:

    image

Implementation

If we like the plan above, a few things to think about:

  1. We'll want to move all of this over to free.law, not CourtListener or bots.law.

  2. When somebody is a member, CourtListener shouldn't nag them to donate, right? It should know they're a member and say thank you. (Technically, this seems tricky, since it means having the membership info in CL and payments in free.law.)

    • This also applies to emails that we send.

  3. The donation page in our profile will probably need some tweaks.

  4. Justia might still have a thing where people can be sponsors of FLP via their website. We should sort that out.

mlissner commented

Looks like we'll need some bylaw updates or at least research:

image

(Bylaws are here: https://free.law/pdf/policies/bylaws-amended-2017-11-05.pdf)

Note that the bylaw metadata in the PDF seems a bit sloppy too. Might want to clean that up while we're in them.

mlissner commented

Our tax preparer says:

Memberships are fine as long as they are really just memberships and doesn’t give them the ability to vote on policy. Make sure you spell in out in the bylaws.

jeniferw commented

Freedom of the Press Foundation memberships - https://freedom.press/donate/membership-program/

jeniferw commented

For actual swag - we want to collect enough $ to cover cost before shipping out.
So I think if the gifts get mailed out after 3 months of membership, that would make sense.

Would like to figure out how to get law firms on this - without having to mail out a bunch of swag.
Trying to decide between an ask of per US based attorney ($10/$25/$50/$100 annually per atty) or actual gift to determine level. ($10,000/$25,000/$50,0000/$100K annually)
For the firms on the list where I've found # of attys on their website, avg is 904 so total giving should be about the same either way - but per atty ask allows smaller firms to participate at larger levels - and the ask seems smaller when in initial conversations).

Thoughts might be:
Supporter = tier one benefits for all employees with your company email
Silver = tier 2 benefits
Gold = tier 2 benefits + recognition on website & in social media
Platinum = Tier 2 benefits + recognition + individualized benefits. (Unlikely we would get $100K level support from a firm or corporate donor without prior conversation & ask)