[LGM] Libre Graphics Meeting Fundraising Partnership

[Frank Trampe]

Hi, Martin.

We'll await further feedback from your board, but, to answer the one
question directed at me, our current arrangement is very decentralized. We
have a global fundraising committee, and for a while a Canadian non-profit
accepted donations and processed travel reimbursements, but most of the
actual administrative and finance work is done by the local hosting team.
This year and next year, a German non-profit, K8 (affiliated with our 2019
hosting committee), is accepting and disbursing funds for us.

This arrangement has worked rather well so far, and, given what you've
said, we might inquire about extending our relationship with K8 past 2019.
The one remaining gap, though, is 501(c)3 status for soliciting donations
from businesses domiciled in the United States. This invites another
question, I guess. Would it be possible for SPI to collect donations and
then to transfer the money raised to a European non-profit? If so, what
sort of fees would that incur?


On Mon, May 7, 2018 at 8:40 AM, Martin Michlmayr <tbm at cyrius.com> wrote:

> (Sorry for the delay!)
>
> * Frank Trampe <frank.trampe at gmail.com> [2018-02-19 16:19]:
> > To be more specific, we're also not asking you to plan the conference. We
> > would still pick the venue, solicit talks, schedule, and the like.
>
> Sure, I understand.
>
> > The four main things from SPI would be accepting funds, disbursing
> > funds, accounting, and helping us to meet any relevant regulatory
> > requirements for those activities. We would work to minimize the
> > burden on your organization wherever possible.
>
> My big concern, as I think I expressed last time, is that I'm not sure
> SPI is in a position to handle all of that, at least not at the
> moment.
>
> There are some things that could be done fairly easily, e.g. invoice
> sponsors and collect payments.  This can be time consuming but is a
> fairly specific task.
>
> But there are other tasks that require a lot of work and there's a lot
> of stuff that needs to be done "right now" during the conference.
>
> Debian is an SPI associated project and they have a conference each
> year (DebConf) for which we do some tasks (but not everything).
>
> The other problem I see is that your conference moves around every
> year (like DebConf), so keeping up with regulatory requirements would
> be very difficult.  We're also not well equipped to deal with some
> countries, e.g. we have banks accounts in the US but not e.g. in the
> Eurozone.  Negotiation a venue and related contracts in different
> countries (with different legal systems) is also quite complex.
>
> So while I could see SPI handle some tasks (e.g. invoicing sponsors) I
> am not sure we'd be able to handle all the accounting related tasks
> you need.  I'd like to see comments from other board members though
> and more conversation.
>
> How have you handled things so far?
>
> --
> Martin Michlmayr
> http://www.cyrius.com/
>
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