[Noisebridge-discuss] membership dues via employer matching funds?

Peter Hamel hamelp at yahoo.com
Fri Aug 21 10:23:24 UTC 2009


So, if you're in a 33% marginal tax bracket (making roughly 30-80k in CA), and you donate $1500, the IRS gives you back $500, so you really only pay $1000. That's equivalent to a 50% employer match. If you have a 2x employer match on top of that, you're effectively giving noisebridge three times as much as you're actually paying. I'm at 3.4x, I believe, and I suspect a lot of other people are similar.

This thread seems hung up on the fact that dues are different than donations. Why not just charge everyone less for dues? Maybe charge everyone $40/month rather than letting them choose a rate. Anyone who's poor is paying the same. Anyone who's rich is welcome to take the $500 they've saved and donate it to their favorite hacker club. Or donate whatever amount they feel like giving. I assume most people have a fixed yearly amount that they want to support nb with, and it's in nb's best interest to classify as much of that as donations as possible. If dues are fixed and low, it's easier to donate.

A typical person paying 33% in taxes could give nb $1250 per year ($500 dues + $750 donation), while only paying $1000. With an employer match, nb would get $2000 per year, still at a cost of $1000 to the member/donor.

Some people might choose not to donate the savings. That's fine, they're not obliged to. Neither are they obliged to pay for the more expensive membership plan, at the moment. Some people might not have the money to pay up front, but then they're probably on the $40 plan already anyways. The long term effects are unpredictable (will everyone choose to donate each year? will the number of members be higher with cheaper membership?), but you can always raise the rates some day if there's a shortfall.

So, I don't know the rules for nonprofits. Does some percentage of money need to come from dues vs. donations or something? Any reason we can't have a bunch of generous starving hackers?


      



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