Charging non-profits and schools

What do you charge non-profits and schools? Do you give discounts or charge them the same?

Thanks.

Depends. I offer a "special" of four hours for the price of 3.25 hours. But if they want less time it is full rate.

I used to offer, at my discretion, a 55% discount to select charities, etc. but over the last few years I have stopped doing that. I have one event where I give them a 40% discount (I've done the event for about 9 years now) but have increased what I have charged them when I put my normal rates up.

I sometimes will knock off a percentage IF I feel like it for a specific event/group but I don't do it very often and it is clearly noted on the invoice and contract what my full rate is, minus "Special discretionary discount" so they know the value of what they are getting.

I generally don't discount schools - I am hired to teach theatre/cosmetology classes quite often and bill them accordingly.

I offer 10% off my hourly rate or they can have me sponsored and charge whatever they would like to make money. Alternately, If I feel it's worth it, I can also charge PPF and then donate 20%.

This summer I did a gig for Planned Parenthood. They sold tickets and reimbursed vendors 50%. I was fine with that because they're a fantastic organization who offers our area so much free healthcare for men and women.

There are currently two charities I work for gratis but that is because they're especially close to my heart and I volunteer extensively with them anyways.

I have this on my website:
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Charity events and Fund Raisers:

For fund raising events there are two options available:

1) A discounted hourly rate made available from the face painter to the organization. The organization can then proceed to sell tickets/charge for the face painting per face, with all proceeds going to the organization.

OR

2) Helena can come at no expense to the charity and will charge participants $6.00 per face, with $2.00 per face going to the organization.

I have only had 2 non-profits hire me, both medical and I gave them a good deal, but I began to wonder if many non-profits have more money to spend on stuff like this than private people that book for parties, especially when I saw them hiring other people for an event. I had one person tell me that it was cheaper to hire me than to buy prizes to give out for a game for an event that they were attending. That's when I began to ask myself if I should be giving a discount to them.

I have also found that non-profit organizations that may not have so much to spend want you to put out all of your supplies, equipment and labor but don't want to hire you or share the money with you. I have had several people see me at events and ask how much it would be to do a fundraiser. At the time I was feeling generous toward this and told them I keep $1 for every design I do and your organization gets the rest. That could have been anywhere from $2 - $4/ design for what I was charging at the time. None of them ever contacted me. I was making a brochure for non-profits and schools and in a section about fundraising and what I would do financially I had put something like this on it: "Something you saw in my booth or set up drew you to me, whether it was my designs, my equipment, or the atmosphere. It takes alot of time and money to do what I do and this is my business. If you are looking for someone to volunteer their time to do face painting for your event, I am sure there are moms or high school students that would love do this for you." I didn't run it off as I was not sure I would do fundraisers or not, but I was a little upset that people kept asking me to fund raise for them for free, but I had to put out all the supplies, gas, use my equipment and so on. I know for a fact that people sell stuff all the time for fundraisers and they don't get to keep all the money, but have to pay for the candy or gift wrap or calendars or whatever they are selling. I think it should be that way for face painting too.

Don't get me wrong. I think non-profit organizations do great things for people. I have been involved with many myself. But I also need to make a living to or I won't be able to do this for long. People in my area don't hire me for parties even when I have been asked numerous times if I do them. I have had 1 person out of a hundred actually hire me and that was for $35 an hour + $10 for gas. (yes that's what I was charging for birthday parties and I still haven't had takers.) Since then I've raised my prices and will be expanding my advertising area. Thanks all for your input.

In a past life I was staff for non-profits and charity groups. YES, they have budgets but the jobs of the event coordinators is to get things FREE to maximize their income from the events.

It is your choice whether to support a particular group or not. Frankly, I will volunteer in another capacity or make a cash donation to groups I want to support. All others pay cash.

I currently work for a non-profit (100+ employees) and we absolutely have an events budget. Most larger, revenue-generating non-profits have a sizeable events budget that's worth tapping into.

Smaller non-profits or NPOs that position themselves directly as charities (not all non-profits are charities) are going to be harder to approach.

Raz, the people asking about your services and not following up might also not be in the position to actually contract you. Eager moms want to feel like they're helping out their favourite NPO by asking if you'd help fundraise for them, but probably don't realize you're expecting a call. If someone asks about your services for their NPO's event, get the name of the NPO so *you* can do some research as to who to contact to contract for the event. I often get tipped off about an upcoming event from an eager mom and then head straight to the Marketing or Development director to present a proposal.

Ooo, good idea, Julie!

Raz, it's also time to pick a new add-free website provider (wix.com is great!). I wouldn't hire you either after getting three pop-up advertisements from your website in as many clicks!

gildedcat- I had no idea that there were pop ups. Never happens to me when I get on my sites. I'll have to check it out from another computer.

Well now, I just checked from the hubby's computer and I see that firefox kept the popups from popping up so I had no idea that was happening. I will have to see what I can do about that. Thanks for letting me know.

@Raz, I use Firefox as well, but somehow the ads escaped my pop-up blocker! They happened every time I tried to click on one of the links in the sidebar menu on the page.

Tried out Wix.com. WOW is all I can say. I haven't published it yet. Want to play with it a bit and finish my site before it goes live. I am thinking I will be using a new website. I also want to get the premium so I can have my own domain name.

Gilded Cat, how do the ads appear on the wix.com websites? just curious.

@Raz, I'm glad you like it! It's pretty fun to play around with and there are so many options.

I pay $9.99 a month for no wix ads, use of my own domain name (I host with dreamhost)

I don't know what a free version looks like with regards to their ads. Maybe someone else on here is using the free version and can chime in?

This website belongs to someone else on the forum, but I think this what the free Wix site looks like w/ adverts. They're not super obnoxious and they don't pop-up, so that's good!
http://www.fun2play.com.au/

My charity thing goes like this:

Fundraising Events
I would love to help you with your fundraising efforts! At this time, the only charity event that I provide services to for free is the "Returns for Leukemia" events in May that benefit the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society of Canada. While I am unable to donate my time and materials for free (there are just too many fantastic causes that I want to support), I have worked out two different options for charity events:

~ Pay Per Face (raising money for you): I will appear at your event to do face painting while charging my standard "pay per face" rates to the patrons of the event. At the end of the event 30% of the collected money benefits your group/charity and the rest covers my costs and materials.

~ Discounted Hourly (free for patrons): I can offer you a discounted hourly rate since it is a fundraiser. This would mean that my payment would come out of your budget, but you could choose to sell tickets for whatever price you choose to regain some of that cost.

I used to give a bigger percentage, but I could fill my whole calendar with non-profits and I wasn't making enough money booking myself with all the discount stuff and turning away full paying stuff. I am not the kind of person to commit to doing something then call them back and say, 'sorry someone offered me more money for your time slot, so too bad.' Instead I just lowered the percentage that I give. There is ONE event that I do for free that supports leukemia research... I had to pick one charity, it is through my husband's work and it is related to children's health so it seemed an appropriate choice.

They get either 30% off of hourly or 30% of PPF... it used to be 50% but I was going broke.... well, I am still broke, but not quite as badly. There are a couple of ones that I still do 50%, but they are near and dear and I won't give that to just any old charity that wants me.

I offer a good discount to fundraisers and non-profits. For my kid's school, I also offer a couple of certificates for parties. Even for discounted rates, be sure to ask for a donation letter with their tax exempt ID and the amount you discounted. You can use this for tax reporting purposes, I also ask to be listed as a sponsor if possible.

As for websites, Wix is great but I was having trouble accessing their sites through my iphone and realized they do their sites Flash, which is unviewable through ipads and iphones. Until this gets remedied (or maybe it has since I checked last Christmas), I'm sticking with non-Flash sites. I know A LOT of people who do the majority of their online surfing/buying through iphones and ipads.

I have 2 web sites (different businesses) one on Wix (adderess way to complicated) the other on Weebly (address much easier to remember). Thinking of changing all to the Weebly.com.

@Peppermint_Mill: Wix launched an iphone compatible version of websites this past winter and has recently launched HTML5 as an option!

It's probably worth noting that (at least here in Australia) to all non-profits and charities our services are tax deductible. They can get back 80% on average but a lot of the time 100% of our fees are claimed.
I don't know about you but after I found this out I was decidedly less "charitable with my time and supplies. Especially when its a huge corporation like McDonalds hiring you for Mc Happy day and trying to get you to do it for publicity ( yes been there and bought the Tshirt).


On the website front I tried WIX and weebly..... I agree with the flash issue.. I won't use any flash on my site for this reason. But I bought my domain name so I didn't have a complicated URL and none of the free building sites would connect to it.
We ended up building our own - when I say we I mean my partner as he uses dreamweaver and windows expression which I couldn't do if someone held a gun to my head.
We bought space on the server at Crazy Domains and it costs me $50 for two years.

Tash, that's true of any business, including yours. Lets say you hire a line manager or pay for someone to put a wrap on your car, their salary/expense is a business expense and thus can be deducted from your taxes.

We have a special discounted rate we do for non-profits and schools. It usually ends up being good publicity for our business and since we don't do too many festivals it's not a huge loss of money. If it's shaping up to be a busy weekend sometimes we'll turn them down because we WOULD lose money if we booked a non-profit over private parties. Our current rate for 2+ hours is $75 per hour, I think we have gone down to around $50 before but we always carefully consider if it will be worth it. And in the past it hasn't been. Sometimes you can't tell til you get there!