There are several reasons why small orgs may want nonprofit status or similar. Official nonprofit status can take many months to get in the US, and cost $10-30k of attorney fees.
One solution is to get Fiscal Sponsorship from another trusting org, but I don’t believe many EA orgs are focussed on being the Fiscal Sponsor of many new and small groups.
There are already many groups that act primarily as fiscal sponsors for other orgs, so it is a pretty tried-and-true model.
https://fiscalsponsordirectory.org
With all of the EA Funds and CEA community grants coming out, I could imagine a lot of groups may want to become more formal organizations.
This fiscal sponsor org would get to learn a lot about what different EA aligned donors do and don’t like donating to, so you could imagine it providing a helpful service to donors (and EA orgs) of suggesting them orgs that they may be interested in checking out, based on their donation patterns. I could imagine this being appreciated by the donors given that it could have enough data points to make genuinely useful recommendations when those opportunities arise.
CPA’s and attorneys who specialize in nonprofit organizations routinely charge $2,500–$5,000 for preparation of IRS Form 1023 applications for small organizations, and $6,000-$15,000 for more complex ventures.
The following two firms used to post public quotes on the order of $2-3k in 2018 (it seems they’ve taken down the public quotes):
Interesting. This came from chats I had with an attorney. That said, they were based in SF, so maybe their prices were higher. I also asked how much it would cost to do “everything”, which I think meant more than strictly file the IRS Form 1023. I believe there’s a lot of work that could be done by either yourself or the attorney, and I would hope that in many cases we could generally lean more on the attorney for that work.
An EA Fiscal Sponsor
There are several reasons why small orgs may want nonprofit status or similar. Official nonprofit status can take many months to get in the US, and cost $10-30k of attorney fees.
One solution is to get Fiscal Sponsorship from another trusting org, but I don’t believe many EA orgs are focussed on being the Fiscal Sponsor of many new and small groups.
There are already many groups that act primarily as fiscal sponsors for other orgs, so it is a pretty tried-and-true model. https://fiscalsponsordirectory.org
With all of the EA Funds and CEA community grants coming out, I could imagine a lot of groups may want to become more formal organizations.
Suggesting a tried and true model is a major plus!
This fiscal sponsor org would get to learn a lot about what different EA aligned donors do and don’t like donating to, so you could imagine it providing a helpful service to donors (and EA orgs) of suggesting them orgs that they may be interested in checking out, based on their donation patterns. I could imagine this being appreciated by the donors given that it could have enough data points to make genuinely useful recommendations when those opportunities arise.
Fiscal sponsorship can be very helpful for new groups!
Though regarding attorney fees:
Where are you getting this from? Attorney fees are on the order of $2-5k.
https://nonprofitelite.com/how-much-will-it-cost-to-get-501c3-tax-exempt-2/
The following two firms used to post public quotes on the order of $2-3k in 2018 (it seems they’ve taken down the public quotes):
https://www.501c3.org/501c3-services/start-a-501c3-nonprofit/
https://www.harborcompliance.com/nonprofit
Starting a non-profit includes non-trivial amounts of other kinds of work though.
Interesting. This came from chats I had with an attorney. That said, they were based in SF, so maybe their prices were higher. I also asked how much it would cost to do “everything”, which I think meant more than strictly file the IRS Form 1023. I believe there’s a lot of work that could be done by either yourself or the attorney, and I would hope that in many cases we could generally lean more on the attorney for that work.