Convert Earnt ‘Drops’ to Charity Donation

If you want to donate money to food banks, donate to food banks. If you want Zwift, grocery stores, or other companies to donate money, tell them to do so. But your drops aren’t worth anything and it’s no sacrifice for you to “donate your drops”.

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Yes, I get what you are saying. And I do donate to good causes. But aren’t the drops actually worth something on the Zwift drop store? And they also signify a customer who has spent a lot of time and money on Zwift. Much like Air Miles here in Canada. People have a choice to donate their Air Miles or use them on the Air Miles store. It’s a very similar concept.

With Air Miles though you can get real things that are worth real money, unlike Drops. So donating Air Miles to charity saves the airline money and means they can afford to give the money to charity instead. Which is a win-win.

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Perhaps I’m in the minority here, but I don’t personally see the point in the Drops Shop, so I just see my balance ticking upwards all the time.

What if Zwift were to partner with an organisation such as World Bicycle Relief, and allow users to spend their Drops in exchange for a real-world donation to a good cause?

Failing that, I’ll settle for the Save Without Quit fix, thanks :wink:

Great idea.

Vote for it!

Save without exit.
I wonder where that is on the list of bug fixes :thinking:

I have accumulated over 3.5 million drops

I never use them, zero interest to be honest

It would be really cool if users like me could donate them and zwift offer a matching monetary contribution to a cycling charity like Qhuebeka or other

E.g 1 dollar for every 10k drops or 100k drops

Thoughts ?

voted, nice idea

same. i got 20M… let’s get some donations going!

@Gerrie_Delport_ODZ @Daren these threads and votes should be merged

https://forums.zwift.com/t/donate-your-drops-drops-for/228583

https://forums.zwift.com/t/using-drops-for-foodbanks/519413
https://forums.zwift.com/t/drops-store-charity-section/44406
https://forums.zwift.com/t/spend-drops-on-something-meaningful/533007
https://forums.zwift.com/t/do-good-with-drops/516145

Another vote here

You do realize that drops has no physical value, so if Zwift donate $$ then their revenue will go down and the subscription will go up. :thinking:

Nothing wrong with spending money on marketing. Why do they have a microgrant program? There’s no direct profit from it.

There might be more good press from making charitable donations than, say, E-Sports, and it would probably be less cash outlay. So maybe our subscription cost would go down. :rofl:

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They never have to lower the subscription cost if a marketing campaign is successful. They just get more subscribers and keep charging the same. Plus if they decide to take drops as votes for a charity donation, they can still limit their exposure by putting a limit on it and hyping that you have to donate now or maybe not be counted. Then decide whether to keep going when they see what happens. They’re in complete control of this budget.

Without knowing the specifics of the balance sheet for the request it’s hard to really say how much this would impact Zwift or the charities in question. But we do know Eric mentioned the need to increase the revenue per user for Zwift from a previous article, and for these things when you convert something that has no monetary value at all (drops) to something that does (a donation), it’s hard to make it up in subscriber revenue due to goodwill unless the amount that is going out to charity is a very small portion of the subscriber’s monthly fees, and thus not that impactful to the charity organization at the levels we have with the number of users on the platform.

So, it’s hard to really say without seeing a very specific proposal with an actual balance sheet, but these things can either result in a net loss to the company, or not a lot of gain for the charities involved depending on the balance of virtual currency to actual donations.

What I’m surprised they haven’t done is vastly increase the amount of customizations you can get for your drops so there’s something to actually use them for above and beyond virtual bike/wheel purchases. Absolutely there are a lot of Zwift customers sitting on millions of drops that are currently useless to them.

I suspect a lot of people with a big drops bank would be happy to use them to influence a customer-choice grant even if the value per drop donated is extremely low, because those users don’t value what they are donating and would be happy to have that influence. So just as an example, if one of the annual microgrants ($5000) went to a charity that was voted on with drops, that would cost almost nothing, and wouldn’t increase the microgrant budget at all, it would simply let people influence one of the choices. It could be as cheap as you want. In that example the cost is zero relative to what they were going to do anyway. Of course they would have to invest in the infrastructure to enable the donations, but that could be reused indefinitely.

I’m sure the usa is no different than the UK, here companies can right off so much charitable donation against their tax bill

just a very short note - before zwift starts doing anything meaningful with drops they should really make sure that they have server-side validation and users can’t manipulate the amount of drops in the client :roll_eyes: