Business Plan
Our mantra: We founded this organization to give money away not to keep it.
Purpose and Basic Strategy
The purpose of Small Change for Good is to help mankind by channeling funds to under supported charities and to launch charitable efforts of our own. It is our intent to keep our your donations free from administrative costs.
As stated in our mission statement, we intend to raise money by having people place our labeled cans in their houses. They will place whatever small change they feel like in the can and take it to either a drop off point or bank (and mail a check or pay with PayPal).
Each can is tailored to support three charities. Two are common to every can (entreAmigos and the Douglas Arner Academic Freedom Endowment). These two will get up to 5% of the donations and are capped at $100,000 each should we raise a lot of money. The third charity is regional and specific to a collection site (the one you want to support). This charity will receive a minimum of 90% to maximum of 100% of the funds received.
Of the money collected for your charity, 20% of the money collected by you can is set aside to establish an endowment to create continued support for your charity.
But Why Use Small Change?
Many people already support worthy charities of their own choosing. Why should they use Small Change for Good?
When most of us write checks to the charities we support, we examine the balance of our check books and think, “I can only really afford to give $20.” So, we write a check for $20. However, Small Change for Good has a more or less painless way of contributing money. You could easily collect more than you would have otherwise given.
Also, we tend to give in isolation. Part of the spirit of Small Change for Good is forming a community of people to act together for the greater good. If you have a charity you love, act as a hub, and convince your friends to take a can. Should you convince 25 people who put a quarter per day in the can, you’ll raise $2.50/per or $900 per year . . . which is substantially better than the $20 check you might write otherwise, even if only 90% goes to directly to your charity.
Why not simply take all of the money for yourself/your own cause?
Well, obviously you could. However, all you have to do is go to a Bank of America, drop off the money to be counted, and send us an email. We take care of the rest.
Further, and we’ll get into this in greater detail, half of the appreciation of the money you contributed that went to the growth fund will be paid back as dividends to all of the charities we support in proportion to their total contributions made throughout our existence. Meaning it is conceivable that a fund that has been raising $1000 per year, by year 10 of their participation, they could get a dividend check for $2000. In other words, by working with us over the long run you could get, in return more than 100% of what you raise.
Getting Cans
Finding inexpensive cans of the appropriate size has proven to be difficult. Yet out of adversity comes inspiration. We intend to launch Small Change for Good by first performing community outreach ourselves. In playing with sizes of labels we have discovered that Progresso Soup cans (3.5” diameter, 4.375” height) will allow us to use one 8.5” x 11” sheet of paper to create two labels. We intend to donate cans of food to soup kitchens and all we want in return is for them to give us the empty cans. Of course, if they want to use us to raise money for their organization, we’d be happy to team up.
What a perfect way to get cans and start the project! By spending a few bucks we can help the hungry and get our project off the ground. Obviously, getting cans is just the start. Which raises the question: Now what?
The Beta Test
Our first effort will be a beta test of sorts to iron out logistical anomalies before we expand beyond our capabilities. Twenty (20) cans will be placed “in the field” (at 20 of my friends houses) each with a different local charity to support. Through this effort we hope to find ways to improve the efficiency of collecting proceeds, create an effective spreadsheet to track the distribution of funds, gain an idea of the time commitment required to process the funds, and start looking into what is reasonable to expect from people running our collection sites.
In this time period, we hope to set up working relationships with Progresso Soup, as a partner for providing food to food banks, and Bank of America, to work in cooperation make the collection and distribution of funds simple and easy.
In addition to learning how to manage the paperwork, we will work on the format of the spreadsheet detailing expenses and distribution of funds. It is our intent to have complete transparency of our financial records. Every month we intend to publish a comprehensible report of our financial records on our website so that everyone can see where the money is going and how it is being spent.
While beta testing is occurring, we will launch an investigation as to how best to establish ourselves, legally, as a charitable organization. After all, we’d hate to raise $1,000,000, give $950,000 away and have the federal government tell us that we owe taxes on $1,000,000.
In addition, as we are beta testing we will be accumulating cans and making contacts. By the end of beta testing we will have developed a detailed strategy for the . . .
Expansion
Once we feel comfortable with the results of our beta tests and we have established ourselves with the appropriate paperwork, we will endeavor to enter phase II of our business.
Part of our mission is to encourage, gratefully accept, and give everyone a chance to be charitable. If we are successful, we will need to reach a lot of people and that means we will be collecting funds from a lot of people. Logistically, this could be a nightmare. The mere processing of contributions from thousands of people could easily overwhelm us.
The Good Side: if we can get 0.1% of America to contribute 3 cents/day, we’d take in 3.3 million dollars per year! Yea!
The Bad Side: 0.1% of America is 300,000 people. In other words, it would take one person 3.75 days without sleep or rest to process the contributions of these people at the rate of one person’s contribution per second (reasonably that is a little faster than we can expect people to work). Realistically, a swift person could process 4 contributions per minute or 240 per hour or 1920 per 8-hour workday. In other words, it would take more than 15 workdays, working full-time, to process the contributions. That would be a very, very, tedious and boring job.
Frankly, that aspect of this project scares me, because it makes me wonder how realistic my limit of 5% for administrative duties is.
So, how can we avoid this problem??????
There are two approaches we want to take to expansion, each involving a central hub where cans are distributed, if necessary, and monies are collected, counted, and distributed.
A fundamental part of this project is that we want it to be a grass roots movement; designed to be of the masses, for the masses, and by the masses. Expansion and distribution will be controlled by motivated individuals, who have a charity they want to sponsor, and through schools, through a character building program given to them at our cost.
Individuals
Any individual in the world is welcome to join us and start their own personal hub. Should someone have an under supported charity they wish to assist, they need to simply contact us for customized labels, find people to help their cause and make sure to collect their funds periodically (we suggest monthly).
We are in the process of negotiating with Bank of America to set up a business account and means to conveniently deposit coins. Ideally, a hub leader would just dump the coins into a coin counter at Bank of America, have them counted and deposited into our account, and drop us an email stating the amount deposited and charity they support.
We also accept PayPal and check via snail mail. Should you not want to work with Bank of America or there isn’t one that is convenient, then the hub leaders may use this alternative. In this case, however, the work is more labor intensive. The hub leaders will have to count (use a coin counter) and deposit their money (via PayPal or mail a check) to “Small Change for Good.”
We encourage individuals with a personal charity of their own to excite as many people as possible without pressuring them. The last thing we want in all of this effort is to pressure people into to giving or giving more than they feel comfortable.
This way, if someone “sponsors” 100 people, their workload is only a couple of minutes per month, but they have helped to reduce the workload of the distribution center 100 fold.
So, let’s take a look at our original hope of getting 300,000 people to participate. Originally, we had estimated that a person working quickly would take about 15 work days to complete the task of accounting for and distributing the funds. If we can get people to buy in to our concept, the work load is reduced from 15 days/month to less than 2 hours per month. Thus, leaving time for those of us working in the central distribution center to do more outreach and charity work ourselves.
Schools
Schools nearly everywhere appear to be under funded and need financial assistance. Some years ago, there were school districts who spent more than $10,000 to purchase a system to encourage and teach students to develop their characters in a socially proper and respectful way. The schools would have students write essays and such, without putting character development into any real form of action. Our aim is to go to school districts with our plan:Character is Developed Through Actions Not Essays.
Our plan, which will be GIVEN to school districts at our cost and presented to each school within the district free of charge, gives students the experience of what it means to give and help others.
In it, the children of the school will select a cause within the school to support (the lists from which the students choose will be developed by a consortium of teachers, parents, and students). Since administrators already have too many burdens, we do not want to tax them with another responsibility. In fact, we insist that they don’t participate.
Without describing the complete plan, the gist is that the cause involves not just monetary contributions on behalf of the students (in the form of Small Change for Good cans), but action where the student assists in the development of such things as: playground renovation, after school tutoring, literacy outreach, etc.
For schools that have no dire financial need, we have knowledge of and access to schools in poorer countries that desperately need their support. In this program, students would not only raise funds to assist these schools but establish relationships with students with these schools. Part of the process would involve a cultural student exchange program where some of the collected funds would serve to provide a scholarship for students from both schools to experience a little of the life the other lives.
In either case, Small Change for Good cans would be distributed through the school site. The students, teachers, and/or parents take the cans home and place change in them. Once a month they take the money and drop it off at a collection center. From there, the monies will be collected by a member of the Small Change for Good team, counted, then distribution among the organizations sponsored by the school.
What about that 20%?
Earlier we mentioned that 20% of the money collected would be placed in a growth fund to earn interest to pay annual dividends and finance ongoing outreach projects of our own.
As time goes by the size of the dividends paid out will naturally increase, since the balance will continue to increase. The percentage of the dividend each charity receives will be calculated based on the percentage of the total contributions made throughout our relationship versus the total money raised by this project. This way, charities who have been contributing over a greater length of time will be credited for their loyalty in partnership and their contributions that still are part of the principle.
Initially, half of the growth in this fund will be paid in dividends and half reinvested. As the cash reserve grows, we may divide this up into thirds to support charity work of our own.