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Will your business be a free entity, or a subsidiary of other non-profits it serves? If it's independent, you may have "alignment" issues with your clients goa
by h2odragon 3y ago
Will your business be a free entity, or a subsidiary of other non-profits it serves?
If it's independent, you may have "alignment" issues with your clients goals not matching yours (and vice versa); if its a subsidiary that gets even worse. "We don't want to share platform with those people" pops up as soon as they feel some ownership of the platform.
if you try to go all the way to "tax exempt" then you get legal compliance issues too: your clients can threaten the whole business by saying the wrong things.
I tried to do a non profit ISP for advocacy groups that couldn't find hosting elsewhere, there for a while. I was proud of what i did but it burned me out completely.
- rastafarigpu 3y agoMy initial thoughts are that it will be a free entity. As per local regulations in Europe, this can't be a tax exempted enterprise either. So basically a cooperative or a private business with a non profit charter. You make an interesting point - I never thought about advocacy groups and the PR risks they might carry. I was more thinking about end users/consumers and private businesses. I suppose that is a risk you carry irrespective I guess - even if you were a private, for profit business. Where was your non profit ISP based if I may ask?
- h2odragon 3y agoUSA, and folded 15 years ago. Before then there was lots less scrutiny of "non-profit" than there is now, here.