[hackerspaces] Billboards for promoting hacker culture!

[Danny O'Brien]

On Tue, Aug 2, 2011 at 12:11 PM, Jerry Isdale <isdale at gmail.com> wrote:
> According to the wiki page, the one bill board normally costs $30k/mo  but
> with connections the owner only charged $7500 for three.
> Thats pretty good deal.
> It is also good to see that Noisebridge was able to contribute $1000+ itself
> (according to wiki).
> They have obviously recovered from last fall's "We are going to have to shut
> down in February" money hemorrhaging...
>
> https://www.noisebridge.net/pipermail/noisebridge-announce/2010-December/000271.html
> What was the turn around?
> corporate/angel donations? getting people to pay their share? Cost control?
> d) all of the above?

NB was never hemorrhaging money -- the space has a fairly flat set of
costs, and (usually) a fairly constant set of income from member
donations and casual donations. Like anywhere else though, it was
worrying when those two lines met at a point where time > the_present
:)

As for what of fixed it, lots of small things: Paypal had been
spontaneously cancelling subscriptions without either the treasurer or
the donor asking for or realising it, so simply plowing through those
and catching up on backlogs brought in a fair bit, and corrected the
future projected income upwards. Some non-members chose to switch from
occasional donations to regular donations, and the fund-raising gave
us a short-term spike too.

Here's a profit & loss from Jan-May: http://nburl.net/pl_janmay11

The pattern for things like the billboard and other one-time purchases
are that Noisebridgers chip in for that separate from the main funds.
Given the small amounts  collected from a large number of NB users
it's not that a problem it's run separately from NB and therefore not
tax-deductible.

Both noisebridge's laser-cutter and this billboard were funded that
way, outside of our core financing.



> Jerry Isdale
> http://MauiMakers.com
> http://www.mauimakers.com/blog/thursday-public-meeting/
> On Aug 1, 2011, at 10:47 PM, Mitch Altman wrote:
>
> Oops, forgot the link to the full story, and larger images:
> https://www.noisebridge.net/wiki/Billboard
>
> Mitch.
>
>
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