Loomio
Wed 4 Mar 2015 10:51PM

Accepting Money

NN Nick Napoli Public Seen by 93

Does anyone have time to figure out the best method to begin accepting donations for the group that does not require us to have a legal business structure (ie - spc, 501c3)?

Currently, we can accept payments through the meetup page but, I doubt that this is the best method.

I think we should need this to be one of our (many) priorities.

Some questions to be answered:
1) Do we need a bank acct in the organizations name, or can this be done with a personal acct of some sort (ie - escrow).
2) What online tool(s) should be used to collect money?
3) How can/should we promote this?
4) If we setup a personal acct, do we need any kind of legal agreement drawn up to denote how the money will be used.

AM

Art McBain Wed 4 Mar 2015 11:00PM

This sounds like something for the finance working group! :) heh

Anyway, some things I know from having done stuff myself, can at least provide an option for #2. I've used Stripe and it's fairly easy to set up a store with it to get money from people or set up recurring billing (subscriptions). Squarespace uses Stripe, but that has a monthly (or yearly) fee. As said though, having written my own store with Stripe's APIs it's easy to get going on for free. (A cut is taken of every transaction, but you can account for that.)

It could be expanded to include other items if you later wanted to collect money for workshops, etc. (Though at some point you may want to just use someone else's already written product ... if you can take the hit of paying them to let you run your store on their platform.)

My store on Squarespace took a bit of wrangling to get set up the way I wanted it to look, but if you don't care about that, the rest is pretty easy. The coupon options suck, but I don't think we'd need that here.

As to #3, best is probably through the website we've set up, word of mouth, and some simple black and white flyers placed at locations people who might be interested in this would be (with the location owner's permission.)