Interest Check: Fundraising SIG or Committee

Currently, Fundraising is a function of the PR committee. Let me start by saying the PR Committee is fantastic and has excellent leadership, and I like being a member very much. I expect great things and success ahead for our committee.

That said, Fundraising is a huge undertaking that, IMHO, needs and deserves its own committee (Edited to say. Or SIG), because it’s a different focus.

IMHO, Fundraising needs its own seat at the table for BoD meetings to be able to ask our lawyer and accountant what we’re allowed to do as a non-profit. Again, PR is VERY responsive when approached with DMS email addresses. We have a great team that takes the public perception both inside and outside DMS seriously. This is not a criticism of PR at all.

Many people have posted that they want to learn how to write grants. Others have connections with companies with money to share.

A Fundraising Committee could create streamlined policies and procedures (with Board, Legal, and Accounting approval) that will make it simpler to gain donations and sponsorships.

I believe we can get funded, and funding will hopefully stop the scarcity mentality that is the root of a lot of arguments.

If you have the time and interest to give it a try, please comment. If there’s enough interest, we can pursue this through official DMS channels.

Thanks for reading.

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FYI, we are a 501(c)(3) under the guidelines of the IRS. You may want to take a look at https://www.stayexempt.irs.gov/.

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You asked in another thread, but I wanted to toss this out here:

I’d start on the wiki’s committee page:
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Then, on to the links it has for more information about the rules
where there is some info about formation:
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In short: drum up interest, get at least 4 (other) interested party members, put together a proposal for the BoD, get it on the agenda for a BoD meeting, and get it approved. Showing a head of steam and a willingness/ability to fulfill the other requirements of a committee are usually looked upon favorably…

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Thanks, @jast!

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This. I suggest a clear focus for the committee, buy-in from related committees, and addressing any objections that may arise.

Edit: And since fundraising is likely to involve speaking to various .gov entities, I suggest first order of business being requesting that the Board bestow someone (or someones) that’s likely to be a good representative of DMS authority to represent the organization for fundraising purposes due to Code of Conduct rule 6:

6. Only persons or members that have been formally authorized to act as an agent or representative for the Dallas Makerspace, are permitted to represent DMS in any and all conversations, writing, or other communication with any public official. Failure to secure permission may result in the forfeiture of membership.
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Maybe starting as a SIG under PR would be a better course of action.

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You bring up very important points, @ESmith. Thanks for pointing this out.

Holly I am very interested I am very interested in being in a fundraising group and inspect we have some fundraising ideas that have already been cleared by pure attacks as being acceptable that I’ve been trying to get going for over 6 months. We first had to get them okayed by them so I understand that the lie and then there’s been all the delay and changes in who’s running PR all we need to do is have probably one meeting to decide on exact amounts and the details and they can be running within two or three weeks. And the funds coming in. There’s other ideas out there. As I tell people I don’t know anything about working in corporations but I have worked and then acted was a member in something like about two dozen different non-profit member-driven groups from church to dog clubs to the sca to menza and others. This is an area I know a little bit about.

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Hi @Cairenn_Day, thank you, I’m going to do what I should have done in the first place and talk with the core group of PR committee members who regularly attend meetings about making this a SIG, as @Edenblue and others have suggested.

Please stay in touch with me.

There is so much to do in straight PR, and fundraising is definitely part of it. It would be great to have more time to focus in on fundraising, probably as a SIG first and a committee when it grows.

I apologize to @Team_PR if I stepped on toes by posting here before asking for this as an agenda item for our next meeting.

TBH, I just saw all the conflict surrounding honorariums and expansion, and want to do something tangible to help remedy the problem by getting additional funding.

I will try to be more patient (even though I want to start right now).

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Sorry for the long post everyone, I tried my best to be brief but i do think this needs to be talked about.

I am relatively new here, but the fundraising situation at the space has always confounded me. Walking in I honestly thought y’all would have fundraising on lock, especially considering we are objectively, like, the biggest and most successful maker space ever…

Maybe I’m out of the loop but it seems that people always seem to forget that we are a public charity , which means individuals, companies, foundations etc. love to give us money for tax purposes and PR (…501(c)(3) status, we all know that).

However, there is another really important point that is oft overlooked, when it comes to soliciting manufacturers and distributors, donating to a large makerspace is a pretty easy sell.

I hang out in the electronics workshop a lot which is supported heavily by Mouser.com. So does anybody wanna guess when I last ordered components from Digikey or Newark? Probably like 4 months ago, there needs to be a large price disparity for me to not order from Mouser, because not only do I recognize their contribution to a cause I care about, but its really hard to argue with the quality of service they provide. (Also the big sign probably contributes more than I want to admit lol)

Last time I heard Mouser donates about 5k worth of goods each year, and they sometimes remind us to send them our wishlist. The point here is that companies see a very significant ROI for donations of this kind, especially relative to other non-profits that only offer tax benefits and brand recognition in exchange for support.

One of the core missions of community workshops is to provide the public with equipment they can’t afford or justify buying. But at some point if you find yourself in a position where you want to buy a tool or material for yourself… it makes good sense to bias your purchasing decision towards a tool you already use and understand.

If someone contacts the right person at DeWalt and says (something to the effect of and hopefully more eloquent):

“hey we are a 2000+ member, volunteer run, 501(c)(3) community workshop out of Dallas, TX. We provide tools, equipment, materials, education, and a collaborative community to the Dallas area public. To do this at such a large scale we require a lot of tools, especially basic battery-powered hand tools such as drills, impact drivers, circular saws, reciprocating saws, etc… We currently purchase from Ryobi for this purpose, but we aren’t really satisfied with their longevity (we actually consider them consumables). This is obviously very expensive for a volunteer-run non-profit, so we are looking into leveraging our mission to provide higher quality tools to our member base without the large expenses associated with repeatedly purchasing low quality tools. So I am just reaching out to gauge DeWalt’s interest in outfitting our organization with a small collection of tools for our members to try out on their projects…”

You get the point, given all the aforementioned benefits on their end, that is bound to start a conversation. And with proper execution from a well supported fundraising team it could cultivate into a long term relationship regardless of the manufacturer.

@Holliday I’m really excited this is starting to come up, and I would have no problem reaching out to whoever we need to try and get some traction. I’ve done this sort of thing before for an engineering club in college, where one of my main functions was managing sponsors. I probably wont be much help on the internal administration side but if anybody needs someone to do grunt work lmk.

@Edenblue I understand the tendency to babystep, (a SIG under PR sounds like a good way to proceed, however i’m not very apprised of our political nuances) but this is something that if executed swiftly and properly could add so much more value to the community than arguing until our keys stick about honorarium.

Anyway, I’m really excited about the trajectory of @Team_PR and I look forward to a even better space!

Thanks all

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Thank you for you’re well presented case. It does seem that Electronics and Mouser are a viable model. Maybe not the only one, but one that is proven. Following that model might avoid the DMS tendency to slide into the minutiae of arguing whether it will work, whether it is legal, and on, and on, and on.

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@Adrian.com, thanks for speaking up. I’ve been a member since April, and everything you wrote resonates with me.

I did my first marketing internship with a major corporation that liked nothing better than to promote the pants off their charitable giving.

Like you, I thought we were fundraising like clockwork. IMO we should be.

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This is why I prefer a committee to a SIG. If there’s a lawyer and/or accountant in the BoD meeting, a newly-installed Fundraising Chairperson would have a literal seat in the room to get these questions answered once and for all.

For what it’s worth, I’m not trying to be the new chairperson. I just want expansion and honorariums funded, and I want to help move that funding forward.

I want the fighting over money to cease. We can raise enough money to cover BOTH expansion and honorarium — I’m convinced of it.

I want classes on the calendar, teachers to be happy, students to be excited about learning new things, and DMS to be the shining example of what a fully-funded (not just with membership dues) Makerspace can be.

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Joseph is really good at this (soliciting tool donations) and was successful in getting Pepe tools to come down and donate a table full of tools.

The one thing I took from the owners visit was he was surprised when he saw our Instagram numbers and that my personal account had more followers than the space.

One of our limiting factors is our social media presence and talk. Free marketing is huge part of the sponsorship/donations game these days. And we can’t utilize talk largely as it is today for these purposes. SEO Marketing Impressions Crossposting Shoutouts Hashtags Branding Product Placement (looking at you blue tape) etc Of course we need SM guidance for the space and members alike. They guy doing his thesis on MS’s across the country was surprised that was one of our areas that lacked focus as well.

We could benefit respectfully from more than volunteer powered Marketing and SM. At this point even committees should be looking at giving x amount for campaigns with budgets and goals.

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@JBluJkt you’re exactly right. The PR committee is putting together a social media plan and developing content and strategy to build our numbers across social media.

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Thats the Baylor Guy… thanks for a good reminder, I’ll reach out to him this afternoon to see if he has any insight/resources on the matter.

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@Kevin … I know you have applied for several grants for the space.
Can you talk about what they wanted? I know one of them was looking for helping a poorer community.
And what you need …

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My take? We’re neither warm and fuzzy enough to excite most potential donors nor do we have kind of data that the donors we can excite want to see.

On the first point, list all mainstream cause célèbre from the past decade or so and see which categories we fit into - case of square peg meets round hole. We’re not an advocacy organization, we don’t serve the disadvantaged, we’re not saving the world from the menace of giant kudzu. Outside of the warm and fuzzy aspect we don’t provide services - i.e. soup kitchens, disaster relief, environmental remediation, basic research, medical care, accredited education, transportation, counseling, whatnot - that are the table stakes basis for so many grants.

On the second point our books are a … problem … and we don’t have much hard data on our membership. If I had to hazard a guess I’d say we’re broadly middle-income, middle-aged white males generally centered around the north Dallas area. The latter we actually know to some degree from rudimentary analysis of billing address zipcodes. But other than that it’s anyone’s guess.

This sort of avenue is probably where we can best realize donor support. However we need to come to terms with what’s in it for the sponsoring companies - namely they’re doing it for both the tax writeoff and the marketing benefits. And maybe they’ll do some micro-variant of Amazon Smile where buying through a portal nets some percentage of each sale for DMS.

This also strikes me as an excellent avenue to pursue. Much like Mouser, this has the benefit of working with our strengths and playing to what sponsoring companies are likely to want. If it means a big DeWalt banner in front of a brand-spanking new tool wall stocked to the gills I’m all for it.

Eh, seems like anything non-curated (read: where actual discussion occurs) is almost certainly going to be bad news for marketing. I don’t see us trying to use Talk - or anything like it - for these purposes. Other platforms - Facebook, our website, a DMS blog - sure … just don’t expect every J Random Member to spontaneously post exactly the right thing at all times.

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What charitable class do we serve?

Most want quantitative data on the current program and what the new reach and impact would be along with follow up on how it worked. A few like the qualitative part in addition which is kind of like the vision. As far as too poor that was just one instance because of a law passed with funding tied to it a couple years ago for IRS identified “Opportunity Zones” If anyone remembers that.

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