[CLUE-Admin] Fund raising comments

[Lynn Danielson]

David Anselmi wrote:
> Lynn Danielson wrote:
> 
>> Yeah.  Somewhere I started to develop a negative attitude
>> about the auction.  I came away from it with a few nice
>> items which I got far cheaper than I should have.  And I
>> lost out in the silent auction to last minute bids that I
>> would have happily bid up.  So, I'm feeling both guilty
>> and frustrated.
> 
> Hmmm...  Would you donate enough to make your buys more reasonable?  I 
> don't know that I spent less than I should have, but I like what I got 
> so I'm thinking of showing my gratitude (or at least a little of it ;-)

Yeah.  I'm kind of broke right now, but Roy's working to raise some
money on EBAY with a RAID card of mine and I've talked to him about
possibly EBAYing the UPS I bought from Roger as well.  So, hopefully
that will amount to something.

> It occurred to me that our group is pretty cheap overall.  Not that 
> that's bad, but Open Source selects for that a little.  It occurred to 
> me (too late) that this was the wrong group for an auction.  Ah well.
 > I'm a little skeptical of the usefulness of future auctions.

The live auction did quite well and showed that we have a couple people
in the group who aren't cheap.  I give special kudo's to Keith who paid
more than market value not only for an old Sun Classic workstation, but
for a vanilla Coke too. :-)  (At least I think it was Keith who bought
the vanilla Coke for $10!)  But the silent auction did very poorly.
Again only a couple people bid amounts over the bare minimum.  Maybe my
impression is mistaken about this.  Jef or Jeff have the auction sheets
and they can speak up and set me straight if I am.

More people showing up would have helped raise more money, but this
being our first attempt at something like this, it was impossible to
know that we'd have such a poor turn out.  Even though I've been
talking somewhat negatively about the auction, we did raise several
hundred dollars.  So, it was a successful fund raising event.  'Just
not one I'm anxious to repeat anytime soon.

> I suggested to Jeff that we do a swap meet and charge admission/tables, 
> but thinking about it that is likely to be small scale too.  Large scale 
> gets into something like CLIQ (speakers like Maddog are more attractive 
> than buying stuff).  But the last CLIQ wasn't so successful either and 
> the economy, and there's a war on (well, not to be too pessimistic). So 
> I don't know.

Some groups do bingo to raise money.  I don't think anyone in our group
is interested in that.  But how about hosting a table at the those swap
meets that are held periodically at JeffCo fair grounds?  I suspect it
would still be difficult to round up volunteers, but I think that's a
far more flexible and interesting venue to CLUEbies.  I'm not sure how
much it costs for a table there.  Then there's the question of who is
going to collect and store stuff.  But the upside is that we could
participate when we were able and we wouldn't have to have a ton of
stuff.  I've only been to one of these events.  Does anyone else have
more familiarity with them to comment on this?

I'm not sure I fully understood what John Kennedy was recommending.
I think he was saying that we could organize our own swap meet at an
elementary school or someplace like that.  My initial feeling is that
this sounds like a lot of work and after our auction, I'm not sure
that we would be able to pull enough stuff together to make it
worthwhile.

> So what else could we do?  Charge dues or admissions?  Pros and cons. 
> Don't know what I think.

I've suggested dues/admissions in the past.  Some of the members I've
mentioned it to seemed OK with it, but I don't think anyone else on the
steering committee liked the idea.  I was luke warm on it myself.  Other
user groups may do it, but it runs against generally accepted LUG
principles.

> Sell concessions?  I don't spend money on that stuff, but it seems to be 
> a hit at the ballgames.  If everyone spends a buck or two, it would help.

I'm for selling concessions.  Soda's would be pretty easy and the next
month or two is going to be warm down in that auditorium.  What else
might we sell, chips, cookies?  Would we have to have someone manning
the concessions area during meetings or could we trust everyone to
chip in on the honor system?

> Raffle?  Again, a buck or two...

We've discussed raffles in the past.  It's cheap to get a book of generic
raffle tickets.  However, because of Colorado's gambling regulations it's
not really legal for us to do it.  We need to be registered with the state
as a nonprofit to start with and then I believe it takes a couple of years
to become eligible for raffles.  So, I think we'd be skirting the law if
we did this and we've already decided as a group not to bother registering
as a nonprofit.

> Corporate donation?  Now we're talking!  Anyone know a good salesman? 

Can you say 501c3?  Most companies prefer to give to charities with a tax
exempt status.  Which first requires registering with the state as a non-
profit organization.  (reference last sentence of previous paragraph.)
If we had 501c3 status and someone was motivated to use it, we could
potentially apply for grants as well as corporate donations.  But as good
as this might sound, there has been little interest by those of us
involved in administrating the group to do it.  A number of us have agreed
that we all got involved in CLUE more for the fun of it.  The administrative
stuff is a burden that we want to minimize.  Because otherwise we're in
danger of loosing the few people who have shown a willingness to volunteer
for these positions.

> The XP group (nothing to do with MS) gets about a dozen pizzas donated, 
> for the public thanks they give at the meeting.  I don't know how to 
> make this happen, but maybe someone else does.

I'm not clear on this.  Can you explain some more?

> How's this?  Some companies benefit from Open Source, even when it isn't 
> a corporate standard.  If there's a project that obviously saves a grand 
> or so, maybe the company would donate 10% of the savings to say thanks. 
>  Guess it might help if we were a non-profit.

Good luck and yes if we had tax exempt status it might help. Tummy.com
stands out a a company that's been very generous to the Linux community. 
Techangle has been generous to CLUE and OMI has chimed in recently and
unexpectedly to help us out in our fund raising among other things.
But I'd be suprised to find many more companies as generous as they've
been.

If we beat on enough doors, who knows?  It seems that for as much as IBM
and HP have been promoting open source solutions, that they might be
willing to make a contribution to promote open source education locally.
But I'm sure that if any of us actually made it as far as discussing the
matter with them, one of the first questions they'd have is whether or not
we have a tax exempt code.  But if you're interested in trying, I'll give
it a stab.

> Would we be able to sell our time to someone?  Not sure how that would 
> fly, probably need a good bit of luck to be in the right place at the 
> right time.  But some things, like pulling cable, aren't too hard. Heck, 
> we couldn't do a worse job than the guys who wired my old office.

I have no doubt that you could Dave.  You could have made for an interesting
auction item. ;-)  We've occasionally had people come to our LUG looking for
help and willing to pay consulting fees.  Assuming that some of us might
volunteer Linux tech support to raise money for the LUG how might we offer
this?  How might we cajole or coerce others in CLUE to offer their services?

> Ok, I'm out of ideas.

It was a good start.   Let's see where it goes.

Lynn