LFSD West Coast Challenge
Long Flights on Short Days
Updated 12/4/2019 for use starting in 2020

You may not be a grand prize winner, but if you perceive personal value in reviewing other pilots flights and articles, we encourage you to encourage our pilots to contribute to our community knowledge base by making a donation that will be distributed to the authors of Long Flights on Short Days.
You can make a donation at the LFSD 2020 GoFundMe page
https://www.gofundme.com/f/lfsd-2020?utm_source=customer&utm_medium=copy_link&utm_campaign=p_cf+share-flow-1
Note: by default, GoFundMe wants you to give them a 10% tip, since we are already paying GoFundMe fees, you might want to skip the "tip" by selecting "Other" and entering "0" for a tip percentage.

LFSD GoFundMe 2020

I haven't personally utilized crowd-source funding, this is my first project, so I'll likely need to update this page after I gain some experience...

GoFundMe was chosen as the online pot "collector" (starting with the 2020 challenge) over other crowd-funding alternatives for number of reasons, however, there are some issues that require workarounds.

Duration: GoFundMe does not require an end date, but we will likely close out the funding campaign at the end of each season and start a new one, rolling over any residual to seed the next season.  The reason for closing and restarting is to clear the "amount donated" from the GoFundMe donation page after we have distributed the contributions.

Fees: GoFundMe charges a 2.9% transaction fee when contributors make donations plus 30 cents per donation, so if the pot grows to $500 via 25 donations the fees would be (500 x 0.029) + (25 x 0.3) = 14.5 + 7.5 = $22, or about 4-1/2 percent of the amount donated.  There is no withdrawal fee and Go fund me does not currently charge a "platform" fee other than the above transactions fees.  Many other crowd-source funding platforms charge a platform fee in addition to transaction fees.

For simplicity, I will pay the GoFundMe fees since it is my intent to contribute an amount greater than the projected fees anyway, so bottom line, the amount raised that is displayed on the GoFundMe page is the amount used to calculate the awards.

GoFundMe Terms: GoFundMe does not allow funding for "promotions", so for our purposes, funding will be to an individual, in this case me, Tom Truax.  It is my intent to use the funds as described, but in an effort to comply with the the service provider's terms, our stated objective is not intended to be a "Promotion", but rather a way for contributors to show appreciation for growing our community knowledge base assets.

The actual language from https://www.gofundme.com/terms is: Quote > Promotions on the GoFundMe Platform: You are not permitted to offer any contest, competition, reward, give-away, raffle, sweepstakes or similar activity (each, a "Promotion") on or through the GoFundMe Services. < End Quote

Withdrawals: GoFundMe is intended to provide the transactional mechanism for individuals to raise money for various reasons, it is not intended to be a bank.  Any money donated does not stay in a GoFundMe account.  The account requires automatic withdrawals, which currently transfer to my personal checking account.  I have set up accounting in QuickBooks to track the automated transfer activity.  The amount withdrawn will be less than the amount donated, but as previously stated, the amount used to calculate awards will be based on the amount donated.  It is possible that I could abscond with the windfall, but my history of participation and contributions to our community indicates otherwise?

There are crowd-source funding website providing options to more directly address our particular activity, but they all charge platform fees in addition to the transaction fees, so they are more expensive.  No one is going to quit their day job in anticipation of receiving a meager award,  so we have chosen to keep it simple and limit the overhead.

Why Crowd-Source?  In the past we simply accepted support donations, but options have evolved since 2005 (the last time we awarded prizes?  We want to explore the possibility that crowd-sourcing might enable more participation which aligns with our primary objectives.