[Board] new Sponsors page draft

[Jeff McKenna]

For board members wanting to see the 501(c)(4) acceptance letter (a 
reminder that for many years we tried to apply for 501(c)3), then we 
heard from Peter Tanner from the OpenNTF foundation who was delayed by 
the IRS with their own (c)(3) application (for "public charities and 
private foundations") so they switched to a (c)(4) application (for 
"civic leagues or social welfare organizations") and were accepted; 
we/OSGeo followed their advice.

Those acceptance documents are in dropbox at 
/OSGeo-finance/incorporation/501c4/irs-501c4-decision-201309/

The application files are at 
/OSGeo-finance/incorporation/501c4/irs-response-501c4-20130830/

Again thanks to the diligence of Daniel, Tyler, David Atkin (the OSGeo 
lawyer) and others.

-jeff








On 2015-10-23 10:38 AM, Daniel Morissette wrote:
> On 2015-10-23 9:06 AM, Helena Mitasova wrote:
>> We also need to to keep in mind our non-profit status which puts some
>> restrictions on what we are allowed to do.
>> Jeff can you point us to the application and any relevant documents
>> that we should be aware of?
>>
>
> Hi Helena, All,
>
> You are right that as a US non-profit organization we are limited in
> what we can do.
>
> The main issue that the IRS found in our non-profit application was that
> we had a project sponsorship program and that this was not acceptable
> for a non-profit. i.e. through the project sponsorship program, sponsors
> could earmark their money for a specific project which constitutes a
> "private benefit" for the sponsor and unfair competition with private
> businesses, so we had to cancel the project sponsorship program in the end.
>
> The following wiki page discusses our responses to the IRS on these
> questions, and includes a list of acceptable activities that we proposed
> and that ended up being accepted by the IRS since they approved our
> non-profit status in the end. See also the link to the PDF of the
> official response from our attorney that is linked at the top of the page.
>
> http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/501c3_Application:_Questions_from_IRS,_September_2012
>
>
> HTH
>
> Daniel