[Coral-List] Policy on Posting of Crowd-Funding Projects

James Hendee jim.hendee at noaa.gov
Mon Dec 29 11:09:09 EST 2014


Greetings, and Happy New Year!

    As you have seen, we have had some recent postings in which
crowd-funding projects are being announced on Coral-List.  I personally
see this as a great new possibility in attaining funding for coral reef
conservation projects at a time when financial resources are so tight,
and when proposals for provincial projects have to compete with much
larger projects proposed by big agencies or institutions. 

    However, you will recall that the Coral-List policy
(http://coral.aoml.noaa.gov/mailman/listinfo/coral-list) includes the
disallowing of any messages categorized as "the pursuit of private
commercial business activities or profit-making ventures."  Therefore,
we will now require that any posting of a crowd-funding project contain
a statement that says the entity or person making the post will not
report a profit from the project to your government.  For instance, at
the conclusion of your post you might say something like,  "Save My
Patch Reef is a 401(c)3 organization," or maybe, "Save My Patch Reef is
a non-profit endeavor."  Of course, if you lie, we would like to remind
you that it's not nice to lie to the Internal Revenue Service (or your
government)!  And of course if we find out, we will disallow you from
making any more such posts. 

    We also ask that you make no more than two posts of such a
project--one at or near the official start date of the funding drive,
and one near the end.

    Thank you once again for all your support!

    Your Coral-List Administrators,

    Jim Hendee
    Mike Jankulak
    Lew Gramer


   


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