Unlocking eSignature Legitimacy for Nonprofits in the United States

How to eSign a document: eSignature legitimacy for Nonprofit in United States

[Music] hello everyone this is Amory from funding for good and today we're going to tackle a topic that seems to be a great interest when Mandy and I are out in the community teaching at small business centers and organizations across the country and this is charitable solicitation licenses who needs it and why so if you are a non-profit working in the United States of America more than likely you have or should have heard of a charitable solicitation license I'm going to give you a little background today and then I'm going to show you how you might go about finding out whether or not you need to apply and how to do that on this little free little tour so to start out with we're going to use North Carolina's page as our guide today but I want to point out one quick thing most recent reports states that there are nine states that do not require shippable solicitation lights licenses those are Delaware Iowa Idaho Indiana Montana Nebraska South Dakota Vermont and Wyoming so if you are in any of those nine states currently you are not required to have a charitable solicitation license in order to fundraise but be sure to check in with your state make sure your accountant stays up to date on nonprofit laws and finances because these things can change with different statutes and different bills passing in your state legislature later so let's jump in today but that just wanted to put that disclaimer out the other 41 states if you reside in any of the other 41 states or your nonprofit is headquartered in any of those states you are going to want to check in with your north with your Secretary of State in some counties or Connally counties in some states it may be the different office and we're going to look at that here in a minute but we're going to just jump over I'm going to show you a web page it's this link that you're seeing at the top of your page right now and I'm just going to go over here and hit search I've already got that little website up in the search bar and we're just going to hit it so if you go to the North Carolina Secretary of State website and you just look up charitable solicitation licenses is what's going to come up this should be similar for every state that requires it but I just wanted to give you a walkthrough so you know what you're looking for first you're going to see an exemption list there are several organizations that do not have to apply for a charitable solicitation license every state will have their exemption list so if you click on this one right here you'll see any person who solicit that who solicits terrible contributions for a religious institution so churches would not in many states fall under this requirement any charitable contributions by federal state or local government or their agency so if you do not fundraise outside of government funds then you might be exempt as well anyone who receives less than $25,000 in contributions so if you are running a very small grassroots organization and your operating budget is 18 19 20 thousand dollars a year you would be exempt in North Carolina for having to get a terrible solicitation license now those are based on your prior year's tax returns or if you're brand new startup it will be based on your projected income each year your account or accountant or whoever does your finances will need to submit a report to the state if you reach that threshold of $25,000 or more you will need to file for a charitable solicitation license at least in North Carolina there are other institutions that do not have to have one certain in educational institutions specific hospitals non-commercial radio television Community Trust volunteer fire departments Young Men's Christian Association so that's essentially the YMCA and nonprofits continuing care facilities and you will see the other exemptions here so every state is going to have a list of exemptions so I encourage you to look at this make sure that you are not on that exemption list because you don't want to spend money or time where you don't have to if you do not find yourself on that list you're going to go down and you're gonna look at a few other things so fundraising consultants and solicitors are also required to have this as as fundraisers with funding for good we do have a charitable solicitation license so any client that reaches out to us and says hey can you help us raise money can you teach us how to do this writing campaign or this annual mailing campaign we have to ask the question do you have a charitable solicitation license because in order for us to accept a contract as a licensed fundraising consulting agency we have to submit a contract to the state before taking on any new fundraising clients when we submit that we have to present the charitable solicitation license number for the organization we seek to work with if the state runs that organization and finds they do not have one then you could be fined several thousand dollars for lack of compliance they may give you a little grace period but in general there is a fee associated if you have failed to file for that for that registration if we are fundraising without that license then we can be fine so it it's behooves us as fundraisers and those who are also fundraising for organizations or at a professional consulting level to get this license especially here in North Carolina now every organization will pay a fee for this charitable solicitation license and it's based on a fee scale so if you click here on the North Carolina link you will see the feasts go and you'll see fee amounts so if you received less than then you don't have to pay anything if you received less than $5,000 then you may not you may get a license and this may be over that amount so you go on through and it looks like the maximum level and this is my experience that anything you know over 200 is not enough normal so $200 is usually going to be the maximum fee that you will pay for this charitable solicitation license on an annual basis with the nonprofit's we've worked for and with in the past usually this is filed at the end of the year in the fall and it covers you through your next fundraising or calendar year it depends on when you filed it you will want to make sure that you check out your state's guidelines and figure out how much you're going to owe make the checks payable to the right entity and then move forward from there so that is a little bit about North Carolina's process and you see here all license applications within ten days must be processed so they will process these quickly you will get a nice little thing in the mail at least from North Carolina that you can hang up in your office that you can have it available some grants will actually ask if you have a charitable solicitation fee so this is very very helpful information to have and make sure you keep it on hand so let's just say that you are not in North Carolina and you want to find out if your state has one easy tool that we all know Google just go to nonprofit charitable solicitation and you could put California let's just put California in here is and you can go through you'll see a little statement here and you can find right here filing a complaint nonprofit registrations and here's a solicitation license for California let me go to registration you might want to put right here so if you put registration non-profit charitable solicitation registration instead of dist elicitation it should take you closer to the site you're looking for here you will notice that California's terrible solicitation law is a little bit different than the other states and that nonprofits must register with the Attorney General's registry of charitable trust within 30 days after initially receives any money or property for charitable purposes so let's say that you've been operating you don't have a charitable solicitation license what do you would do about that very simply you know don't continue to operate out of compliance get on the internet it takes just a few minutes to fill this out have your accountant your treasurer or someone from their organization fill this information out and get that filed as soon as you have that file that's a very quick process so I encourage you to do that if you need any other information about this topic you can jump over to funding for Goods web page and I'm clicking you over there right now you see us going on to this all the time head over to funding for good head up to the search bar we're just going to type in and you can do this for any word your heart desires charitable solicitation license and if you type it in there we have some little nifty blogs about this topic the first one that shows up this the top five things every nonprofits should know about the charitable solicitation license so once again every state has different qualifications different exemptions different fiefs scales but if you do not know if your organization has a charitable solicitation license you need to you need to ask your count and ask your treasurer then you need to make sure that you are in compliance being in compliance means that you can solicit funds through mailing campaigns through social media through fundraising special events any way that you're soliciting dollars for a mission that counts as fundraising so if you're doing those things your state requires a charitable solicitation license and you have not registered for one you are out of compliance you're not compliant and you could be susceptible to a fee so once again something every nonprofit should know we are surprised every time we go into public that organizations say wow I didn't know that so we thought we would bring you this little tidbit of information today thank you for taking the time to join us we hope to see you on some of our upcoming webinars and if you have any questions feel free to pop us a message over on funding for goods Facebook page or pop us an email have a great day you