Me and some dudes run a small Go club in the PNW. We get 6-8 people weekly, occasionally more. We want to raise some money for club equipment by setting up an optional donation that folks can make when they attend club meetings.
What is the best way to set that up? I thought about setting up a Venmo acct separate from my personal one, setting up a nice little QR code card at the table, but you need a separate phone number and that’s a hassle - i could set up a google one but then id never use it and it would eventually get revoked. Any other good, easy options for raising a digital club cashbox?
Edit: PNW is Pacific Northwest, USA
Interestingly, this became a discussion about how nobody knows what the Pacific Northwest is, “Why not real cash?” and “collecting money is too hard”.
Please continue ridiculing the OP at your pleasure, however if anyone with experience running a club has useful advice, I’m open to it.
I’m guessing you are in the US so I can’t answer your actual question but have you approached the AGA? They might be able to support clubs with equipment if that’s all that you are after.
If someone on the internet asks a question without giving their location when it is a key piece of needed information (or uses a cryptic abbreviation only familiar to a limited locale), it is a pretty safe bet to assume they are from the USA.
It’s so much hassle though!
We are getting right off topic here but if you can find a cash machine you can get a note then you need to get change from somewhere, which means finding somewhere that takes cash, buying a small thing you don’t want, carrying the change about (I only ever leave the house with my phone and keys now because I pay for everything with my phone), all just to make a small donation to a go club.
In the UK you’d just make a bank transfer or use a sum up machine or something super annoying like Collctiv but it also seems that there might be rules in the US about accounting and tax or bank account fees that we don’t have in the UK (or people just ignore)
I find it very amusing that at least 2500 years after the invention of money the question about how to transfer it between two people who are in the same room still needs discussion.
I was thinking more about something like sumup where you just have an app on you phone and people just pay by contactless. It costs 1.69% per transaction. https://sumup.co.uk/tap-on-phone/
In the U.S., anything involving money these days has accounting and tax implications: a whole mountain of bureaucracy. Have you considered asking people to donate go sets, rather than money? Of course, that would be more expensive to an individual, so perhaps multiple donors could jointly purchase a set and donate it.
Then there is the question of possession or storage of the sets. If you meet in a trusted venue (church, library, school), it may be possible to arrange for storage on site.
Specie money is that old, but our modern system of paper and dross metals is much younger.
In the U.S., cash is theoretically much more than “valid.” It is “legal tender for all debts, public and private” by Federal statute (Legal Tender Act of 1934). In other words, it is a Federal crime to refuse to accept cash. Of course, that is now one of the most unenforced laws in the U.S. I would guess, because the government wants to abolish hard cash.
