Kickstarter.com is a website where people can post about projects that need funding.  Other folks can look at the projects and pledge money to them.  If a project meets their target goal for pledges then the money transfers.

I was working on a Kickstarter project for our transmitter and studio equipment.  Things went pretty well until I got to the payment part.  Kickstarter uses Amazon for their payment handling.  That’s good.  I went to Amazon Payments, put in all sorts of information, gave them our bank account info, I thought we were ready to go.  But then they told me that, since I selected “non-profit” as our business type, I had to have a 501(c)(3) determination letter from the IRS.. and send them a copy.

Well.

When we started this thing we created a non-profit corporation in the State of Mississippi.  We added the recommended paragraphs to our incorporation documents that the IRS wants for 501(c)(3) charity non-profits.  But we also saw that the IRS says you can act as a 501(c)(3) for 27 months or until you gross more than $5000 over one year.  Until that time you do not need a determination.  If someone walked in here today and wanted to give us $50, I could tell them truthfully that we are a charity and their gift is tax-deductible.

The problem is that the IRS wants $400 to  get the letter of determination.  And we don’t have $400 that we wanted to spend on that.   So we didn’t.  And we don’t have the letter of determination and Amazon Payments won’t let us be a non-profit on their system.

That kind of grinds my bunions.  I told Amazon Payments they were discriminating against small non-profits, and they are.

So now I have shifted my focus to Indiegogo, another crowd-funding website.  They don’t use Amazon Payments, so I won’t fall into that again.  They give a discount to registered 501(c)(3) organizations and I saw that trap waiting for me and didn’t step in it.  A discount would be nice.  But, again, $400.

I have not made it all the way through the Indiegogo setup yet, so there may be something waiting to crush me.  But I hope not.  My next big endeavor is to create a video that presents our project.