Charitible Donations

I'll throw the EFF out there as a candidate. https://www.eff.org/

Updating to RTBC since there are three charities listed and comments seem to have grown stale. Feel free to modify.

As mentioned in https://drupal.org/comment/8280523#comment-8280523, I think we need either a single recipient, or a clear plan for how we're splitting money between multiple recipients. I see a few options here:

1) All money over $X (or registration budget needs, probably around $4,000) goes to a single charity.
2) All money over $X is split evenly among multiple charities.
3) Registrants set their own donation recipients and we no longer have a base budget amount at all.

I'm not sure if #3 is feasible with the budget or not, so we'd need to confirm that if we want to go that way. I personally favor #1, as it's easiest to describe to registrants, which I hope will result in higher contributions. Assuming this works well, we can always pick a different recipient every year.

Based on the community feedback that I received when I was collecting data on #2153453: Identify a Camp Theme, I think it is a bad idea to favor one charity. The intent is good, but it may be viewed poorly by others.

Given that information, my vote is for #2 as long as that equates to an even split between the charities. I'd love to be able to support #3, but agree that the implementation would take additional effort and should be avoided.

I suggest we give all donations to EFF this year. If anyone doesn't like that plan, please suggest a specific alternative plan to keep this moving forward.

To make that a little clearer, by "all donations" I mean all money we collect after reaching whatever budget need we establish.

According to our financial processor, we cannot use our funds to do political lobbying or to pay a lobbying organization. I do not know if EFF might be defined as a lobbying organization. I am researching further.

Looks like EFF would be OK.

From EFF's website:

EFF is a 501 (c) (3) nonprofit organization. Our tax ID number is 04-3091431.

From IRS website:

In general, no organization may qualify for section 501(c)(3) status if a substantial part of its activities is attempting to influence legislation (commonly known as lobbying). A 501(c)(3) organization may engage in some lobbying, but too much lobbying activity risks loss of tax-exempt status.

From OMF, our financial processor:

EFF looks okay to me. For our purposes, if they're a 501(c)3, they aren't a lobbying organization.

#2153453: Identify a Camp Theme is RTBC on LSD as the theme. Sounds like the feedback cyberswat got on the diversity theme is that we should focus on diversity of attendees first. Does that change things for this issue?

I was thinking we'd do something more general like EFF this year, and do something more tied to a diversity theme if/when we do that theme.

I suggest we put this up for a community vote. That would both make the decision simple and also start getting people excited about giving to charity via the camp. I'm thinking something like this:

We're planning on doing voluntary pricing for DrupalCamp Colorado registration this year and giving any unneeded registration contributions to charity. Where would you like to see the money go?

* Ada Initiative
* Code.org
* Electronic Frontier Foundation
* Split between all 3

Then we post that where the whole community will see it (e.g. groups.drupal.org, Twitter, etc.) and go with whichever option wins. Sound good?

I created https://groups.drupal.org/node/393493 ... I had to abbreviate the poll title due to field limits. I set an intial time of 2 weeks for the poll to allow us time to properly circulate it.

Setting to RTBC now that the poll is closed.