i've run into the problem that when people donate they think you owe them something. It happened to me several times until I made a policy on my site that if a user donates they are not being "paid" members, therefore they are not entitled to say how they want their money to be spend or ask for a refund. They are donating not buying stock. Sounds harsh but it works and people still donating.
Nice to see that you have had success with donations. I'm afraid of adding that to my sites because I always thought people might get the wrong idea...
My personal point of view is there are a lot of ways to generate income from a site. If your site is offering informations, google adsence or donation is a good idea but if your site is offering digital products ( free or paid ), the story will be different.
A while back we setup a 'private' area of our forums and only allowed in long-time members, frequent posters, etc. For these members we also relax posting rules, allow them to post in RTF, and post all of our newest, super-secret "widget info" in this private area. As an incentive to get others to start making more posts, we started accepting donations; members that donated the (riduclous sum of) $20 are allowed into this private area. - I honestly thought that no person would be willing to pay this amount, and I was hoping it would spur a lot more posts -- I was SHOCKED to see how many people started sending donations! (i also made it clear that they are not purchasing anything, blah, blah) - since we started accepting donations we've been averaging about 3x more than my adsense earnings in donations alone (and that's a lot of $$).. I've even had one $50 and one $100 donation!! - i am still shocked. - I guess our visitors love our site! The moral of the story is, if you have something that visitors want, and if they like your site, they WILL donate.. .
Im not a big fan of donations unless its a community type site where people are contributing to the hosting of the site etc. Or where you are giving something, eg software, away for free. Asking for a donation there is fine, but people who ask for a donation for nothing really bother me.
It works for serious themed sites and sites that people are truly addicted to Check out the DP donations page, I believe it collected USD 60k IT
DP is a great community site, that's why it works. But these people with small blogs or forums etc, asking for donations is a bit unjustifiable.
Unjustifiable? Nah. For a small blog or forum, just get an amazon pay page, make the first few donations yourself so others "think" people are donating, and they'll start giving, too. People are sheep.
Well you know something i did that but i didnt get a $ for a period of a week with 2000 unique visitor per day. How come you did that? Can we have your site to take a look?
I think the best way to receive donations is via PayPal. However I believe you require Business account to accept donations, but this is free. https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=p/xcl/rec/donate-intro-outside