Charity Donations and accounting

Hello all. After discussion at the Dartmoor training briefing last weekend my points for action included researching the best method of accounting for the money we raise that is open and transparent and above reproach.

Putting all the suggestions together it seems the simplest way would be as follows:

1.Simon will continue to organise the corporate sponsorship, wing branding, capital funding and disposal of assets and all the accounting thereof will be done by a professional accountant.

2.The above will be kept completely separate from general fund raising and individual pilot sponsorship. This can be organised through an audited third party collection agency such as "justgiving.com" so that all the accounting is done for us and the money raised never touches our hands but goes directly to the nominated charities. To that end I have set up two pages so far (another 6 to follow - one for each charity we are supporting).

Please check out justgiving.com/forceschildren and justgiving.com/warwickairambulance

Feed back to me your comments for improvement and I will proceed to create pages for the other 6 air ambulances we are supporting.

Each paramotorclub.org member throughout the country can set about raising sponsorship and donations by whatever means they wish and feed their collection into one, any or all the charity pages.

It seems logical that each affilliate club will donate to both the Forces Childrens Trust and their local Air Ambulance. Dont forget to tell your local Scouts, Army/Air/Navy Cadets, Women's Institutes, Round Tabel and any other group who might get excited about raising some money for these causes on the back of the publicity of this event.

The justgiving site gives us a break down of who has given what so we can dish out BIG Cheques as token award just like Children in Need type telethons.

Come up with your own ideas of how you will raise awareness and get donations pouring in and share them so we can all see what works.

The above is a plan in development so please put forward any improvements and constructive comments. We dont have very long now to get this thing rolling and the basic accounting and collection process is now in place.

Simon this is a miniwidget page of the justgiving site with a totalliser. Can you get this working in this site? its just a "Flash" as you can see.

We will need one for each account, I will talk to my web guy about this in detail today about the creation of the 'donation' page.

This system works a lot better that our last, and I am sure that more people will now donate (directly to the charity) as well as the corporate sponsors of the event it's self.

SW