Benefit Concert

glassharmonica
Sat, 13 Oct 2012 00:15:01 +0000

We’ve done a lot of benefit concerts. The problem with accepting checks is that you need to have them made out to the charity itself, not the kids, which means that whoever is doing the gate for your event needs to make sure that’s what they write on the “to” line of the check. This was a problem for us in the past, and meant that we had to decide whether to contact the donor and ask for a fresh check, or to deposit it and then write a new check to the charity.

If you are collecting online donations you should probably get a fiscal sponsor like Fractured Atlas or The Field. My daughter is involved with a charity that uses a fiscal sponsor. I don’t know it it is all right to link to the website they made for the charity, but if you Google “fiscal sponsors” you can find out more about them. It would be very complicated to set up a 501c3.

[Edit] Another reason for having a fiscal sponsor would be to enable them to use one of those “Square” attachments to a phone to accept donations at the gate. I’ve not tried this yet but I really need to set it up for the next event we do, as many people walk up the gate expecting to use a credit card.