Fundraising Success or Bust Idea's

hytwr1 · **Joined:** Sat Jul 01, 2006 9:07 am **Posts:** 211

Well, it looks like we are all on the same page with this idea.

Bill

nkpsteam779 wrote:

Thank for the matching suggestions. The large bank I work for does that but only up 1500.00 bucks. To get the real money from them is when the locomotive is in Cleveland and can be worked on. Every employee that works on the locomotive is worth 200 bucks per time you work on it and its unlimited.

So all of us on our board have taken advantage of our employee matching so far which has put a small dent in the over a bill but still will need outside help either in the form of people willing to donate, corporate sponsors, foundations and even grants.

I know our secretary of the group is looking at one of the crowd funding idea's given before and see what that could produce. There is no magical bunny out there I realize that but if 2K here, 3K there can be done with fundraising you can get the end results pretty quick.

So onward we march to try to make the date.

Best Regards,

Steven M Harvey

FLO · **Joined:** Tue Jan 25, 2011 2:07 am **Posts:** 328

Can a crane company donate its services to a non-profit as a tax deductible donation? I'm sure it could, but I bet crane and heavy lift companies are not very charitable. They're in a competitive biz and overhead has to be high. Hence, there's probably no room for charity.

I spotted this crane on my way home today. Looks like the perfect hobby crane.

sbhunterca · **Joined:** Sun Aug 22, 2004 7:58 am **Posts:** 728

Quote:

Can a crane company donate its services to a non-profit as a tax deductible donation? I'm sure it could, but I bet crane and heavy lift companies are not very charitable.

We've had crane companies give us exceptional deals to support our efforts, but outright donations are very rare in this field.

A related option is large construction/ steel erection companies with their own heavy cranes. Often there is a better chance of outright donation of services from this sort of firm. The difference being, the crane is just a tool, rather than being the main focus of their livelihood.

Steve Hunter

wesp · **Posted:** Thu Apr 04, 2013 9:31 am

I have had luck with asking suppliers and contractors to donate their profit - that is we pay the direct costs for labor or materials. A local quarry supported us for many years by charging us only the trucking cost for delivery of ballast. Of course we had to work around their schedule for paying customers. A crane company or other service may allow you to do the same.

Wesley

Alexander D. Mitchell IV · **Posted:** Thu Apr 04, 2013 9:43 am

My own experience is that they may be able/willing to donate the services of the hardware, but you're still, unless you're extremely lucky, going to have to foot the pay for the crew.

nkpsteam779 · **Posted:** Thu Apr 04, 2013 2:29 pm

You are correct on paying for the labor and some of the transportation costs.

Just wanted to let folks know as an update that I have been able to save 25K off the bill now on the Taylorville side. A blessing came this week when 25K could be erased from the budget in form a phone call from a class 1 track inspector stating they could run the rail-cars with the locomotive and tender on them without needing to do any track improvements on there side. This still leaves the track upgrades on the shortline side to get the railcars to the class one but we have saved $$ getting her to class one railroad. So we are now down to 175K to get things done.

I also wanted to publicly say thank-you to a people who have sent us donations due to seeing this posting on this board and have sent notes stating they hope it helps us reach our goal. Due to your generosity I can take another $300.00 off of the fund raising that needs to be done. Thanks again to the folks who have donated to make it possible to try to reach our goal.

Best Regards,

Steven Harvey

David Johnston · **Posted:** Thu Apr 04, 2013 4:24 pm

Where our crane company helps out is that the union contract guarantees the crew an eight hour day when they are called out. So they try to find a short morning job and do our work in the afternoon. That way we only pay for hours actually worked, not the eight hour minimum.