There’s a “Make a Donation” link in fine print in the lower-right corner of the slippy map on the homepage. A recent forum post points out that it’s difficult to find and even difficult for some to see. I don’t have specific traffic statistics, but I guess I’d agree with that anecdotally. Can we find room for a Donate link in the navigation bar at the top, maybe between Help and About?

In the past month, as I’ve introduced OSM mapping to laypeople and GIS people, several times someone has asked something along the lines of: Are you a nonprofit? If so, how come you don’t have a Donate button on the homepage or any mention of it on the About page? They seem to expect it in the navigation bar, since that’s where most nonprofit sites have it. One of the pages in the navigation bar, Copyright, does have a donation link as of #5132, but it only helps people who land on the copyright page from map attribution. No one else would expect it to be on that page.

A Donate link wouldn’t need to be any flashier than the other links in the navigation bar. It wouldn’t be a donation drive, just something to get users where they want to go. We can probably remove the existing “Make a Donation” link to avoid redundancy. That would also avoid suggesting that the donations go directly to “OpenStreetMap contributors”, which appears directly to the left.