#neohdama

Happy Holidays! It’s Jackie. (And it’s totally not weird that I’m the only person writing blog posts. Just as a reminder NEOHDAMA isn’t my project, it belongs to our whole group.)

It’s almost Christmas, and I’ve been thinking a lot about the act of giving to NEOHDAMA. But first, I should update you on our activities.

A video posted by abbey clark (@abbeycleluzer) on Nov 29, 2015 at 9:31pm PST

That's me waltzing lol

Did you go to our fundraiser on November 11th? Did you think it was AWESOME? I did. We had a lot of really cool bands performing. The bar was open for beer, and Shelby was nice enough to donate all of her tips that night to us. I don’t know how many people showed up, but the parking lot at Sterk’s was full. What with donations, bar tips, raffle earnings, and merch sales we raised $450! What did you like about the fundraiser? What didn’t you like?

So you’re probably wondering now that the fundraiser is over, what else are we doing? The board has been talking a lot about federal nonprofit status. Right now, we are a nonprofit because we don’t have paid employees. However legally, we are still a corporation. It takes about $400 and 1 year to complete the process to be legally a nonprofit. Which is why it has been taking us a bit. We’ve debated, is it worth it to spend 50% of our savings on nonprofit status? I’m pretty sure that we will though, because having that status has its incentives. But as always, all of our major decisions are up for vote by the board of directors.

Now for what I’ve really been wanting to talk about: future fundraising. Yeah sure we will have more music show fundraisers. (At this point, our next show fundraiser is out of my hands because I’m not involved with booking shows.) The type of fundraising that I’m thinking about right now is more like crowdfunding, fundraisers at restaurants, and AmazonSmile.

I think that we won’t launch a crowdfunding campaign until we have a venue secured. Hopefully that will happen in the next 6 months.

Regarding fundraisers at restaurants, I mean the kind of fundraiser where you get 20% of sales at Chipotle on some time that you’re in charge of promoting. Did you do that kind of stuff in high school? I did for student government. I did apply to have a NEOHDAMA fundraiser at Chipotle but they didn’t get back to me. It’s probably my fault for not following up. But there are about 3 other restaurants that I know who do similar charitable fundraisers. Would you even go to one of these things?

And AmazonSmile. It’s when 0.05% of your amazon purchases gets donated to the charitable organization of your choice. Which seemed like a cool idea for us until I read this article. The article says that by donating with AmazonSmile gives you a mental “pat on the back” that kills future inclination to actually donate directly to charity. That’s messed up, huh?

Well those are my thoughts. Do you have any ideas for fundraiser? Let me know.