The Brony Thank You Fund continues it's march toward a better world with a whole bunch of grand accomplishments for 2016 and the first quarter of 2017. Below the break, get a breakdown of what exactly has happened so far and their plans moving forward.
TL;DR version
- Foal Papers has joined the Board of Directors, replacing Calpain
- The Fund raised $29,578 in 2016 and donated $21,000 to cancer research.
- Tickets are still available for the Lauren Faust fundraiser for CalArts at EQLA
- The ever-popular discount button program will continue next week at BABScon
Full version
With
2017 a third gone, the Brony Thank You Fund has a number of important
announcements to make. We'll start with the happy news that we're now
20% more British-accented, with the addition of Foal Papers to our Board
of Directors. Foally replaces Calpain, who has asked to step down.
We'll miss our resident EQD'er, and thank him for his dedicated service
to the fund, which included several conventions spent relentlessly
hawking calendars to buck cancer.
We've also
just sent our tax forms off to the IRS and the other wonderful state
agencies that demand a sacrifice of paperwork every spring. You can read
our full form 990 in all it's glory at http://www.
- We took in a total of $29,578 in donations, with most coming from convention activities. We also had a significant amount of money raised through programs such as Amazon Smile and other corporate matching fund opportunities.
- We, in turn, donated $21,000 of that to our 2016 partner, the Dana Farber Cancer Institute.
- $3,713 went to printing and distributing our calendars.
- The remaining $2,673 of our expenses went to a variety of administrative costs including state filing fees, credit card processing fees, hosting and other costs, and rental cost for the Lauren Faust event we're running this fall, which has since been largely refunded to us as we decided to partner with EQLA instead.
- We began the year with $6,382 cash on hand, and ended the year with $8,603. We need to have a fair amount of money available at the end of the year to pay for printing the calendars in January.
In
total, the fund has raised $189,027 since our inception, and has
already crossed the $200,000 mark with the proceeds we've taken in this
year! Of that, we've passed $150,667.61on to our partner charities,
giving us an "efficiency" of 79%, which is to say that 79 cents on the
dollar donated was passed on to the causes we support. This is pretty
high for a charity like ours. For reference, the American Cancer Society
only passes 59.9% of their funds on to program costs, and The Wounded
Warrior Project spends 75.1
cents on the dollar on program costs. The reason we can't pass on 100%
is that we have to pay to print our calendars, ship them around,
register with state agencies, pay for tables at conventions, etc. No one
associated with the fund draws any salary, we're all volunteers. We
very occasionally help out a volunteer with some hotel costs when they
travel a great distance solely to fundraise for us, but it in no way
covers the huge amount of money that we spend out of our own pockets to
make this thing go. In fact, in all of 2016, we only paid $200 to
reimburse travel costs.
We'd
also like to remind folks that tickets are still available for "An
Evening With Lauren Faust", our fundraiser to increase the size of our
scholarship at the California Institute of the Arts (The Derpy Hooves
Scholarship in Character Animation). If you're planning to attend EQLA,
you can sign up for tickets right on the EQLA registration page [https://equestriala.com/
Finally,
if you're heading to BABScon, we'd like to remind you to BUY YOUR
BUCKING CANCER DISCOUNT BUTTON FROM US BEFORE YOU GO IN THE DEALER'S
AREA! Seriously, if we had a dollar for every person who comes out with
an armload of merch and then realized they could have saved $10 or $20
with a simple $5 donation to us, we wouldn't need to fundraise
anymore!!! It's a simple concept: Donate $5 to fight cancer, get a cute
button, show the button to dealers, get discounts, save money. Or get
one of our 2018 calendars for $13, get a button thrown in with it, etc,
etc. We'll be located right outside the main dealer's room, you can't
miss us.
