Floods

[morsla]

I really like the Oz wargaming community. Sure, sometimes it's hard to remember those reasons when mediating disputes, locking trolls out of the forums or trying to track down the occasional ripoff merchant on the trading area... in general though, I think we have a pretty decent group of people on the WargamerAU website.

Lately we've been organising some fundraisers for the flood appeals - mostly focused on the Queensland Premier's Flood Appeal, but also raising some money for the Victorian Red Cross Flood Appeal. I haven't had any spare cash to donate, but I do have the ability to organise things for people.

To begin with, I set up a new forum to let people auction off gaming items they didn't need any more, with all money going to the QLD appeal. We did the same thing two years ago for the Victorian bushfires, and people donated even more items this time. The auction ran for two weeks, and closed last Friday. I've been tallying up the total (and contacting all the buyers, as I'm the central point for auction payments) and we've now raised $2150.

Unfortunately my PayPal account has been having some problems. One payment had the words "flood appeal donation" in the description, which triggered an automatic reclassification of my account (a verified business account I've used since 2006) to "Charity/Non-profit," and I've been given six days to provide a whole bunch of paperwork - including proof of tax-exempt status, which I obviously don't have. I hope they respond to my email before suspending the account.

I also ran one of the Melbourne legs of the FloodWar tournament series. They work like a normal tournament, except that players get a book of tokens to use in their games. Each token costs them 50c, and gives them the ability to re-roll a die or some other special rule. At the end of the day, two prizes are awarded: one for the person who used the most tokens, and one for the person who had the most used against them. We raised $760 at the Warmachine tournament, and the running total from other states now comes to about $3000.

We had some great support for the tournament series from games companies like Privateer Press and Defiant Gaming, both donating whole armies of models for a national prize draw. PP sent us an appropriately flood-themed army of alligators and fishmen, and the design team signed a hardcover rulebook for the lucky winner. Support from home and abroad has been fantastic, with prizes donated by lots of people who heard about the flood and wanted to help.

Comments

[lena-supercat.livejournal.com]

I've used a Paypal account to collect donations before and had the same thing happen. Looking back at my records from the time, it looks like what I did was: send a message to Paypal support via their web form explaining the situation and saying that we were not a registered charity and did not have tax-exempt status, as "according to Consumer Affairs Victoria (http://www.consumer.vic.gov.au/) community groups/clubs that use only unpaid volunteers and raise <$10,000 per year do not need to register for fundraising." They were ok with that, they just asked me a few more questions about what we did, our business model, what we planned to use the money for, and what website(s) we planned to use to collect donations. I hope your situation gets resolved quickly.