Alright... as you all know, I do freebies because I like to, and because I have NO desire to do this on a "for pay" basis. Background story:
In college, I went to school on a choir scholarship. My whole life, I loved music, loved to sing, play piano, listen -- music was my stress relief, my hobby, my enjoyment, my relaxation.
Because I was on scholarship, music basically became my "job" -- I had to do 2 hours of choir rehearsal a day, weekly lessons which obviously required daily practice, yada, yada, yada. In short... I dropped my scholarship my Senior year because I was absolutely burnt out. I hated singing, hated playing piano, hated everything about music.
To this day, though I own a piano, it hasn't been played in a couple years. I was on our church's praise team for about a year -- but that was almost 3 years ago (2 moves ago!). While I do enjoy music again, it's no longer a stress relief, a love, a relaxation... all those things that made it wonderful.
As a summary... my experience with getting paid to do something you love, for me anyway, results in resenting and potentially hating the thing that brings you stress relief and enjoyment. It was a costly but valuable lesson -- and a mistake that I don't want to make for myself with digital scrapping and design.
So... where am I going with all this rambling? As soon as I finish this post, I'm going to go in and remove the links to all the template freebies. I still have all the templates on my computer, so they're still available, just no longer as free downloads.
Why this change?
Well... my husband recently took a job as Executive Director of a non-profit agency. I mentioned it a few posts back. This agency is 100% donor funded -- including his salary! Now obviously, he didn't get into the non-profit world for the money, but being able to feed the family is a nice thing! So.... moving forward, I'll originally offer the kits as freebies, but then convert them to a "for donation" basis. So if you give $1 or more to my husband's organization, I'll give you the link to the kit.
We'll try that for a while and see how it works.... :)
For those of you interested in finding out more, THIS is the organization to which 100% of the donations would go.
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3 comments:
Sarah, I applaud your decision to offer your amazing work on a donation basis. God has given you a gift in design - why not use it to support those you love? Best wishes,
~Nancy in NY
Nancy summed it up perfectly in her post. I think that you have a wonderful idea.
I also think this is a wonderful idea! Your designs are great and I love that you are doing something to benefit others as well. I had to make sure I wasn't reading something I wrote when I read the story above. I was also a vocalist on scholarship and by half way through my masters started hating singing. I went for several years without singing...sad but it happens more than you would know. So, to a fellow musician...hats off to you!
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