[Marketing] [SLOBS] How to best describe Sugar Labs

[Bernie Innocenti]

On Fri, 2012-10-05 at 09:20 -0400, Bradley M. Kuhn wrote:
> Bernie Innocenti wrote at 18:10 (EDT) on Thursday:
> > I filed a form at work to qualify Sugar Labs as a charitable
> > organization eligible for an employee donation program.
> 
> I'm confused, since ISTR you work at Google, and Conservancy, which is
> Sugar Labs' charitable organization, is already listed with Google's
> employee donation program, AFAIK.  We've even gotten donations made by 
> you matched by the employee matching program, earmarked for Sugar Labs.
> 
> Thus, I'm pretty confused why this sort of thing would be necessary.
> Sugar Labs isn't an entity unto itself outside of Conservancy, so I
> doubt these employee programs would recognize it.  If they have a spot
> for "specific projects" within a known non-profit, that would be the
> place to put text like that.

There are many different charity programs at Google:

 http://www.google.org/giving.html


The one I used for past donations was the Employee Gift Matching
program, which works with any US 501(c)(3) and is for relatively small
donations.

Programs such as GoogleServe, Google Social Impact Award and others
require qualifying the organization. This is what I'm applying for now.


> My guess is that it's likely going to confuse the EasyMatch people if
> you try to submit Sugar Labs as its own entity using Conservancy's EIN.

These particular programs are not handled by Gift Matching, but I'd
expect both google.org and Gift Matching can understand the concept of
fiscal sponsorship and restricted grants, which is very common in the
NGO world.


> I presume your goal is so that people inside the company see "Sugar
> Labs" and know they can donate to support it and learn about it, when
> they might not know about its Conservancy affiliation otherwise.  That's
> a laudable goal, although my preferred way of doing that would be to
> improve the description of Conservancy to explain that it has many
> projects, including Sugar Labs, and for Sugar Labs to promote further
> that it is a member of Conservancy.

I mentioned the SFC in the grant application, but my current goal was to
enable donations directed specifically to Sugar Labs, as I'm not
personally involved with any of the other member projects.

If you send me a few paragraphs similar to the ones I wrote for Sugar
Labs, I could file a separate application for the SFC.


> Anyway, If you want me to talk with the internal people about how
> Conservancy works with its multiple member projects and earmarked
> donations for each, I'm happy to do so.  But, I hope you will talk with
> someone about this before just submitting it. It takes a lot of work to
> get EINs configured correctly for these matching programs, and the
> Google one is working, and I'd hate to disrupt it.

Sorry, I've already filed the form yesterday. If they come back with any
questions about the SFC - Sugar Labs relationship I'll send them your
way.

-- 
Bernie Innocenti
Sugar Labs Infrastructure Team
http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Infrastructure_Team