Hi Steven,
What basically ended up happening in 04' was we really had a great success, I had never imagined that we would pull of such a campaign as we did and well in simple words 'we rocked!'
Everything was great, we had plans to do it in 05' and I was working on getting other organizations involved and I was really hoping to double what we did the year before.
Then I visited my CPA in April for taxes and just gave him a rundown on what we did and that we planned on doing it the upcoming year. This is kind of when things took a turn for the worst. I was told that I would have to claim the entire amount on my taxes and I ended up getting taxed on the total amount. In the end I think it was really worth it, but something that really ended up having an affect on my taxes for that year.
Looking into things I realized that coming into the next year we would without a doubt be killing our previous year in donations and started to look into the possibility of becoming a full blow non-profit organization. From that point after looking into things, talking to a few lawyers (both non-profit and friends of the family who are lawyers) I realized we would need to pay fees to both state and federal governments, hire a lawyer, create a board of directors, have a treasurer and just really make things complicated.
The main point of me starting the toy drive in '04 was to get donations and ensure everyone 100% of the donations they send in would be used to purchase toys, no legal fees, no board of directors or anything else fancy. Just a simple setup that would allow people to get the most 'bang for the buck' when donating instead of going the normal donation type to salvation army, amvets, toys for tots, secret santa which in the end goes through the organization and probably 50% of your total donations goes to actual toys.
The reason for this is in most organizations some people are paid and there are many overhead costs such as housing for the toys, processing of the money, paying of salaries etc. I don't think
most non-profit organizations do this on purpose but it is just how it works for this type of setup.
My goal again was to get your money turned into toys with 0% getting filtered out in the process.
Due to all this mess I decided to just toss the idea last year and had no plans of really doing it again this year. Our two options that would allow us to keep our goal in getting a 100% donation turnover would be to either have people send us toys (remember a lot of places have free shipping this time of year, esp Toys R Us) to a PO Box I could pay for out of my funds or mail us gift cards and we just go out and buy toys as we did before.
I think the fact that paypal was used for the first year was what made the toy drive such a success, no one had to really put much effort into it and sending with paypal is really simple. I think that doing either of the above options would really cut us back on donations and to be honest I did not think maybe people would be willing to do it and still have my doubts.
I also did go see another CPA in June just to make sure the guy I was talking to knew what he was talking about and he pretty much gave me the same line that by taking cash donations I am required to include that on my taxes and report it as income, something I really can't personally afford. If I was a larger company and had the funds to support something this big it would be no problem but at this point I don't.
I talked to a few other forum admins who are running 'toy drive' types of things and taking paypal donations and was pretty much told they are just doing it, not reporting it and if they get caught will try and 'explain to the IRS' what they did any hopefully get out of it.. This is not something I feel comfortable doing, especially with the amount of money we did our first year. These guys are mostly probably going to do <$1000 and one maybe around $2000 which is not as big of a hit if they do get caught.
I am very open to suggestions if you guys are interested in doing something this year, like I said I am more than willing to take gift cards or actual toys in the mail and keep them at my place and spread them around to a bunch of different organizations. We have bought a house since then and I have a 500sq foot basement just waiting to be used
You guys can post here or email me at pmowery??at??okihost.com or shoot me a PM and I will send you my phone number if there is something you want to chat about over the phone.
I have a few forums who have posted asking me about this so we have some other support from a few other boards looking to help spread the word if we decide to make it happen, but we all know WHT will always be the heart of the toy drive where is pretty much started.
I am also willing to work with anyone in my area who may want to hook up to make this happen, I am in MA, but I am willing to drive to CT, NY or RI a few times to make this work, but if not me and my wife are ready to do it again. It was really one of the best feelings ever seeing what I had planned on being maybe a couple of hundred matchbox cars turn into 20-30 trips with the van full to toys r us and other places and I would love to do it again if we can all find a way to keep it simple and stay away from the legal mumbo jumbo.
Thanks again for all of your support and I am very interested to see what you guys think and sorry for such a long winded post:
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