I’ve done volunteer work for a non profit organization for about three years now. Things are getting bad and there are some people who insist that we can force members to help with fundraising and others say that since it’s non profit we cannot force anyone to help.
This is a youth organization in Pennsylvania.
What’s the real story ?
Thanks.
You’re going to have to define “members.”
Do you mean paid employees? If so, their job descriptions probably say something along the lines of “plus whatever duties are deemed necessary.” So yes, they could be forced to raise funds.
Do you mean people who volunteer their time to the organization? Well, you can’t force a volunteer to volunteer, and what would you do if they turned you down?
Do you mean people who receive services from your organization? Frankly, I don’t know.
By members, I mean the parents of the children who benefit from the program.
You can put strings on on the support you offer to receivers of your charitable services. For instance, you can provide thingscalled "matching grants’ where you match the contribution of someone else. However, if these people are really “members”, that suggests they have some kind of governance role in the organization, perhaps a vote for the board members, perhaps some say in the rulemaking of your organization.
AFAIK, there is nothing inherent in the legal definition of a “not for profit” corporation that prohibits requiring some kind of contribution or participation from those that benefit from the organization. However, it’s certainly possible to cross over a line. For instance, if you’re a food kitchen raising corporate money on the understanding that you will be providing free meals to the poor, and you end up charging the poor x hours of labor for their meals, you are likely committing fraud. OTOH, if you are a PBS station with members and volunteers from the community, you could offer some special premiums in exchange for certain commitments from them like answering the pledge phone during the fundraising drive.
But what you really asking is the operating guidelines of your own employer, and nobody here is going to be able to answer this with much more detail, without more info from you about what kind of gig it is.
I guess more details are needed here.
It’s a youth organization. The fee for 1 year is $25.00, this includes uniforms, trips and textbooks. The $25.00 only pays insurance. All the rest is paid for by funds raised by volunteers.
I’ve been a volunteer for a few years now and there is only a handful of us raising the funds for 50 kids. We’ve asked other parents to help, but have gotten nothing. We asked if we could make it manditory for the other parents to help by donation time or goods or cash.
We were told that as a non-profit organization, we can’t force anyone to do anything.
I’ve been looking on the net and have come up empty handed.
Thanks.
Of course you can “force” them. You’re “forcing” them to pay $25 a year, aren’t you? There’s no difference between having a yearly user fee of $25, and having a yearly user fee of $25 + x number of volunteer fundraising hours. If they don’t want to do it, they can decline involvement in the organization. There is absolutely nothing in the rules and regs of a 501©(3) (the IRS category for your typical non-profit organization) that says anything remotely similar to how you can use volunteers or members.
In the meantime, have you contacted your local community foundation for assistance? They can provide a tremendous amount of help - both financial and consulting. And while I heartily dislike the United Way, they could also be an organization-saving resource to contact.
Finally, the best thing about getting fundraising out of your volunteers and members (non-staff) is that you don’t have to claim their hours for fundraising expenses on your 990.
You can also raise the fee from $25 to $35 or $50 or whatever you need in order to cover costs. You could always tell people that you have to raise the fee because there are not enough people participating in the additional fundraising efforts.
You can tell them the fee is $25 plus 2 hours a month of volunteer work. It doesn’t have to be “fundraising” - it can be 2 hours per parent of volunteering to clean or set up or whatever. That way you don’t have to pay any employees to do it and those employees and other volunteers are now free to spend more time fundraising, since the cleaning and setting-up duties are going to be taken care of by parents as part of the yearly fee.
Maybe you can’t force people to go door-to-door selling candy bars but there are lots of ways to force them to contribute more money and/or time to the organization.
Slight hijack: how’s your board doing on the fundraising end? In most small organizations, it’s the board’s responsibility to do fundraising; this may mean writing letters, applying for grants, hosting progressive dinners, hitting up their friends for money, etc.
Unfortunately, most board members on small organizations are totally useless when it comes to fundraising, and refuse to do it because it’s not fun.
Daniel
Do you contribute money as well as time? Have they ever given you a brochure or written materials describing how they spend your and other contributors’ money?
It’s extremely unlikely that they are promising such a specific deal to donors that they don’t have the flexibility to change the details to take note of economic necessities. As a volunteer there, you should be free to ask for the organizations bylaws, which spells out their what parties may make what kinds of decisions.
My WAG is that either the senior staff or the board believes it would be inappropriate to change the deal, and your suggestions are just being brushed aside.
Just bumping for an update and to subscribe to the thread. Any more insight, dragongirl?
I can’t see how there could be any general prohibition on requiring members to assist with fundraising. My kids go to a parochial school. It is a non-profit organization. Each family is responsible to raise a certain amount of money per year. If the family doesn’t raise the money by participating in the raffles or the candy bars, the quota will be added to the tuition charge.We also must perform a certain number of hours of service to the school- or pay an hourly fee for the hours not performed. Since all the parochial schools in the area have the same policy, I assume it must be legal- or else the parents just never complain because the alternative is worse.
When my son was a Cub Scout, we had a similar problem. The pack charged $25 for registration, and we raised the additional money necessary through car washes and bake sales, etc. The twenty five dollars barely covered the basic expenses- registration with the BSA, a magazine subscription and awards. It didn’t cover trips , craft supplies , Christmas gifts to the boys or Pinewood Derby cars. That came from the fundraising- in which the same 6 or 7 families out of fifty participated every time. After a year or so, we just raised the registration fee to $50 which covered everything except the trips- those were “pay as you go”.
You could raise the fee, or arrange it so the fee covers less- for example have a separate charge for each trip . If you worried that some people will not be able to afford an increased fee, you could do what my son’s sports leagues always do- they solicit a few donated prizes from local businesses, charge a registration fee of say $50 and when you pay the fee, they give you 50 $1.00 raffle tickets to sell. You can throw the tickets away, fill in your own name on all fifty or sell them and recoup the registration fee.
I used to work at a Catholic school, and this is pretty much how it worked there, too. If your kid went to our school, you had to agree to spend a total of 2 nights a year working bingo, and to participate in whatever yearly sale drive we had (at the time I was there, it was calendars with raffle tickets in them). The last year I worked there, the school had parents vote on whether to continue the sale drive or just pay an extra $100 a year in tuition, and the parents voted for the tuition hike, which I think was just easier for everyone. The bingo nights were pretty much non-negotiable, though; if you couldn’t make it, you had to send another adult in your place. Bingo raised a lot of money for the school and I don’t think the parents would have liked to see how much of a hike tuition would have had to take without it.
Well, I’m a bit confused about a few things. We don’t have a board as far as I know. As I said it’s a youth group and we live in a poor rural area, so the people around here don’t have much money.
There are three parts to the group, the commanding officers, the kids and the parents organization. The parents are supposed to raise the funds. It’s only been a few people who do the work and we have asked to have the entrace fee raised, but since money is a concern for everyone the COs don’t feel comfortable raising it. He doesn’t want any of the kids to have to leave.
The parents sent letters out begging for some help and in return we got a lot of people complaining that they did not have the time and telling us it was illegal to make it manditory since it is non-profit.
All I know for sure it that we are a non-profit organization.
Thanks again.
Well, you don’t *have * to have a board. But it would be extremely rare and unique for a non-profit to not have one. Your executive director has to answer to someone, ultimately. Most likely, the CO’s are board members, or have just used the term “Commanding Officer” as a replacement for “board member”.
If the COs are uncomfortable to raise prices for fear of excluding some children, you should look into some grant money to pay for underprivileged tuition. Set some objective criteria for determining who would be eligible, a way for the application process to remain private, and submit a proposal to your community foundation and other foundations (local and otherwise). If you’d like, I’d be happy to submit one for a long-shot grant - I need the grant writing experience.
As for the legality of it, your members are vastly underinformed.
This organization of yours is souding stranger and stranger. I need to ask some more questions that I hope you will answer.
Are the commanding officers paid a salary for their work? Or is anyone else paid to do this full time, or maybe seasonally?
You are non-profit… does that mean you are tax exempt? If this entity is recognised by the IRS as a not-for-profit corporation, it will have a number to give to vendors so they don’t have to pay sales tax. Have you ever bought any goods for this group? Do you know if they have such a number?
Do they tell donors that their financial contributions are tax deductible?
If it’s a 501©(3) organization, you can check the group’s tax return at www.guidestar.com. That will tell you who the board is and how much, if anything, any employees are paid.
The organization is www.theyoungmarines.org
Every unit is run differently and the fundraising is up to the commanding officer. It’s all volunteer, the staff and parents don’t recieve any pay at any time.
We have a tax exempt number and when the public makes a donation we tell them that it’s tax deductable.
I have purchaced a number of very small things for our unit, but I’ve never claimed them on my taxes.
Ok, now I get it. You are a local chapter of a larger organization. You have little or no flexibility in the details of the adventures, which are offered among all the affiliates.
Here is your governance structure. Let us know what you think.
Well, it’s a 501©(3) - your everyday average non-profit. There’s nothing legally that would prohibit your organization from raising prices, etc. However, what may prevent you from doing so would be guidelines in the charter from the parent organization. Looking over the by-laws…
What may be of confusion is Section B, item 1. All that means is that as a non-profit, any revenue created by the organization must be put towards the organization and not distributed to its members (unlike a for-profit, where revenue and profit are distributed to shareholders).
Another item of note:
Section F, item 3: The Unit shall not establish a Board of Directors.
**Article IX covers funding. ** Section A would be the item you need to bring up - it gives the organization the power to use any means to raise funds. There are no restrictions, and nothing to suggest raising fees or requiring individuals to engage in fundraising is inappropriate. In fact, it charges the “Unit” to ensure that funds are sufficient for the operations of the organization. I take it that “Unit” refers to the COs and Registered Adults.
So are you a Registered Adult Member? If so, ou get to help elect or vote out the commanding officer and change the policies.