Re: Charging non-profits and schools

by Perry Noia on Tue Jan 10, 2012 9:21 am

My charity thing goes like this:

Fundraising Events
I would love to help you with your fundraising efforts! At this time, the only charity event that I provide services to for free is the "Returns for Leukemia" events in May that benefit the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society of Canada. While I am unable to donate my time and materials for free (there are just too many fantastic causes that I want to support), I have worked out two different options for charity events:

~ Pay Per Face (raising money for you): I will appear at your event to do face painting while charging my standard "pay per face" rates to the patrons of the event. At the end of the event 30% of the collected money benefits your group/charity and the rest covers my costs and materials.

~ Discounted Hourly (free for patrons): I can offer you a discounted hourly rate since it is a fundraiser. This would mean that my payment would come out of your budget, but you could choose to sell tickets for whatever price you choose to regain some of that cost.

I used to give a bigger percentage, but I could fill my whole calendar with non-profits and I wasn't making enough money booking myself with all the discount stuff and turning away full paying stuff. I am not the kind of person to commit to doing something then call them back and say, 'sorry someone offered me more money for your time slot, so too bad.' Instead I just lowered the percentage that I give. There is ONE event that I do for free that supports leukemia research... I had to pick one charity, it is through my husband's work and it is related to children's health so it seemed an appropriate choice.

They get either 30% off of hourly or 30% of PPF... it used to be 50% but I was going broke.... well, I am still broke, but not quite as badly. There are a couple of ones that I still do 50%, but they are near and dear and I won't give that to just any old charity that wants me.

by Peppermint_Mill on Sun Apr 08, 2012 1:38 am

I offer a good discount to fundraisers and non-profits. For my kid's school, I also offer a couple of certificates for parties. Even for discounted rates, be sure to ask for a donation letter with their tax exempt ID and the amount you discounted. You can use this for tax reporting purposes, I also ask to be listed as a sponsor if possible.

As for websites, Wix is great but I was having trouble accessing their sites through my iphone and realized they do their sites Flash, which is unviewable through ipads and iphones. Until this gets remedied (or maybe it has since I checked last Christmas), I'm sticking with non-Flash sites. I know A LOT of people who do the majority of their online surfing/buying through iphones and ipads.

by Fun Frog on Mon Apr 09, 2012 9:05 pm

I have 2 web sites (different businesses) one on Wix (adderess way to complicated) the other on Weebly (address much easier to remember). Thinking of changing all to the Weebly.com.

by TheGildedCat on Tue Apr 10, 2012 4:21 am

@Peppermint_Mill: Wix launched an iphone compatible version of websites this past winter and has recently launched HTML5 as an option!

by Tash on Tue Apr 10, 2012 7:43 am

It's probably worth noting that (at least here in Australia) to all non-profits and charities our services are tax deductible. They can get back 80% on average but a lot of the time 100% of our fees are claimed.
I don't know about you but after I found this out I was decidedly less "charitable with my time and supplies. Especially when its a huge corporation like McDonalds hiring you for Mc Happy day and trying to get you to do it for publicity ( yes been there and bought the Tshirt).

On the website front I tried WIX and weebly..... I agree with the flash issue.. I won't use any flash on my site for this reason. But I bought my domain name so I didn't have a complicated URL and none of the free building sites would connect to it.
We ended up building our own - when I say we I mean my partner as he uses dreamweaver and windows expression which I couldn't do if someone held a gun to my head.
We bought space on the server at Crazy Domains and it costs me $50 for two years.

by TheGildedCat on Mon Apr 16, 2012 12:27 am

Tash, that's true of any business, including yours. Lets say you hire a line manager or pay for someone to put a wrap on your car, their salary/expense is a business expense and thus can be deducted from your taxes.

by girlbyjuly on Fri Apr 27, 2012 11:00 pm

We have a special discounted rate we do for non-profits and schools. It usually ends up being good publicity for our business and since we don't do too many festivals it's not a huge loss of money. If it's shaping up to be a busy weekend sometimes we'll turn them down because we WOULD lose money if we booked a non-profit over private parties. Our current rate for 2+ hours is $75 per hour, I think we have gone down to around $50 before but we always carefully consider if it will be worth it. And in the past it hasn't been. Razz

Sometimes you can't tell til you get there!