One of changes that we made to the site last week was to bring Team Donations to the forefront a little bit more by adding an “Expiring Team Donations” list to the “The Latest” activity page and “The Girls” listing pages. The Team Donations feature was a bit experimental and has been around since the new site launched, but we never really went into much details about the how and why this feature works, this post is meant to change that.

Team Donations work in the following manner:

A benefactor (let’s call him Mr. Generous) discovers a lady on the site he would like to support, but he’s not quite sure she will stick around long enough to reach her goal, so instead of committing to a donation he makes a pledge for $50.00. At the time of the pledge, Mr. Generous provides his billing information and we run an authorization for $50. This is NOT a sale at this point — just an authorization that it’s a valid credit card and there are sufficient funds to cover the $50. She has not received any money in her account at this point (yet).

Another benefactor (Mr. Charitable) logs into the website and sees the above mentioned lady has received a pledge of $50. He checks out her profile, maybe exchanges a few messages with her and ultimately he decides that she is a worthy risk to invest in. So he pulls out his credit card and chooses to match Mr. Generous’s $50 pledge. At that point we create two transactions:

1. A brand new SALE for Mr. Charitable’s $50 match, and if approved…
2. …we convert Mr. Generous’s $50 authorization into a sale.

The net effect here should be obvious. This lovey lady gets a boost to her earnings by $100, and it only cost each of the benefactors half of that amount — hence the title of “Team Donations”

There are a couple other things to know about Team Donations:

• The initial pledge must be made with a new credit card transaction — this way we can ensure that the funds are available at the time of a donation match.
• The donation match can be made with either Boob Bucks from ones Boob Bank balance, OR a new credit card transaction.
• When the original pledge is made you may see a hold placed on the funds by your credit card company.
• If no one matches a pledge by the expiration date, the original authorization gets voided and nothing is charged to your credit card — further reducing any perceived risk of donating.
• Completed pledges and matches are treated just like any other donation in that if she doesn’t reach her goal and quits the site, the donations come back to you as Boob Bucks so that you can recycle those donations for use with someone else — including another match opportunity!
• In some very rare cases the conversion from an authorization to a sale may fail, in this case we still proceed with the second match donation and treat it like a regular donation.
• You can technically match your own pledge if you wanted to.

It’s worth pointing out that the pledge expiration date is not adjustable since we have no control over how long a credit card company will hold an authorization on a card for. In actuality the duration varies from card company to card company and isn’t published anywhere (that I know of).

We think that Team Donations are a great way to hedge your bet on new ladies accounts that you may be on the fence about donating to. It’s rare that just one donor will carry a lady all the way to HOF on his own, but if he’s got the support of other donors then it can certainly help to not only convince her to stick it out for the long run, but also convince other donors to support her since she’s more likely to succeed with the backing of others.

And… now that we’re featuring these expiring team donations more prominently, it’s a way to actually PUSH ladies that you’re interested in in front of other potential donors! It’s almost like putting out a no-risk advertisement for your friends profiles.

A couple of enhancements to this features that we are considering are:

• Displaying the username and/or the feedback rating of the donor who has made the pledge.
• Letting ladies make pledges to their own profiles (but not matches).

What features would you like to see to make Team Donations more effective and fun?

As a follow up to a previous notification benefactors can now see how many free message credits you have on the ‘Add Message Credits’ page.

We have to perform some hardware maintenance on one of the servers tonight which will result in the website being unavailable for some time. We have scheduled the maintenance for 5pm EST and it is estimated to take less than an hour. Sorry for any inconvenience.

We’re going to be pushing out yet another set of improvements to MFI in the next few days, a couple of which have been highly requested for some time now so we’re happy to finally be able to deliver these to you!

Shorten time to receive abandoned message credits: When a lady deletes her account on her own accord, any paid message credits she had received will come back to the donors immediately — just like donations. For accounts that go inactive by being dormant or suspended there is no change and those credits will come back to the original donor on the regular schedule (assuming the lady they were sent to didn’t reach HOF). This change ONLY applies to accounts where a lady actively clicks the “Delete My Account” button herself, or if management removes an account from the site for a violation of the rules.

Access inactive ladies profiles: For ladies profiles that are no longer active you will still be able to access her profile, but it will be a limited view:

1. Only 3 tabs will be shown: profile, photos, conversations
2. the action buttons such as “Block User”, “Report User”, “Send Message” and etc. , “Donation panel” will not be available, but the Unfriend button will be so you can remove them from your friends lists
3. On the “Photos tab” only “My Personal Pics” menu will be available so that you can access any private pics she may have sent you for a donation.

Keyboard control for paging through photos Just use the left/right arrow keys on your keyboard to flip through photo galleries.

Email notifications for pledge matches Now when another benefactor matches one of your pledges, you will be notified via email (according to your email preferences) that the pledge was matched. We’ve also highlighted Expiring Pledges on The Latest page to help bring more awareness to donation pledges.

Custom MFI Business Cards for ladies Ladies can now download printable MFI business cards with their username and unique referral URL on them. These can be printed out and handed out at clubs, bars, events, or anywhere else you want to promote. They would really go over well if you were wearing an MFI shirt!

Plus a bunch of various bug fixes including some lingering Chat issues that seem to only be affected a small subset of people, as well as ongoing efforts to optimize code to improve page loading performance.

We’re also working on optimizing our internal development processes by eliminating some inefficiencies and reducing unnecessary procedural steps to try and bring more clarity to the progress of tasks. The goal here is to streamline the development cycle and deliver more frequent site updates to you.