2021 Financial and Year-End Statement
Hello friends, supporters, donators, and followers! As we approach the end of 2021, the LINC Leadership Team would like to thank you for your incredible support in our first full year as a business. We started the year fresh off of getting our business license in November of 2020, and most of our year was spent establishing business practices, building our website, organizing our fundraiser, and bringing on team members to help us reach our goals. In this document, we’d like to have a brief recap of our year, discussing our goals, what we achieved, and where we are financially.
We started our year with just over $200, having just months prior taken our first withdrawal from the Patreon we started to help fund our efforts, and reimbursing our board members for start-up costs. From there, our team, which consisted of our three founding members Lawrence Moore, Christopher Tang, and Jeanette Esparza, as well as some organizational assistance from Ashley Naron, focused exclusively on building our website, and launching a fundraiser to help us start accomplishing our goals. We also began searching for additional team members and a graphic designer to help us choose a color palette and create a logo for us. Our good friend Halden volunteered her time and helped us build some organizational documents and practices we could use to plan our fiscal year.
Q1 went by quickly, building momentum, meeting new friends and gaining new contacts and as we moved into Q2, our focus was on our fundraiser, which was scheduled to begin at the end of April. We spent the entire month preparing our newly commissioned logo and colors, reaching out to streamers, larp organizers, content creators, and anyone else who would help us spread the word about our fundraiser, and who we are as an organization. Our friends at Reverie Studios introduced us to the team at Playable Theatre, who we quickly partnered with, and organized a raffle with the proceeds going directly to our fundraiser.
Our fundraiser was ambitious, we set out to raise $1000 to help pay for our 501(c)(3) application, as well as earn funding to build a program to pay for diversity consulting for LARP Organizers who needed financial assistance. In addition, we launched our fundraiser, and had our first Webinar. Monday night of our fundraiser, as we began the stream that was produced by Make.Believe, our Facebook page hit 1000 followers, a symbolic milestone to begin a huge campaign.
The fundraiser was a huge success. Just over 24 hours after the fundraiser went live, we exceeded our goal of $1000. By the end of the week, and after the donation of the raffle tickets income, We’d raised over $5000, and after platform fees, our total revenue for the year reached $5300, well beyond what we expected to earn in the first few years. It meant that we could ramp up much more quickly than what we expected. We made a few stretch goals through the week, and now it was time to get to work.
With the fundraiser behind us, we immediately began executing a plan to ramp up more quickly than expected. We wanted to be more than just a service for financial support and advice, we wanted to help empower more people to provide their input on how to increase diversity in our hobbies. We wanted to build resources to support our consulting partners, and we wanted to help pay for more of the emotional labor that had already been done by marginalized people. But we also knew that we were trying to navigate a space that didn’t really exist in a capacity we knew of up to this point. We needed help.
Our first decision was to spend more time researching what applying for 501(c)(3) (Tax-Exempt) status would mean for us, and in what ways we would be limited. After many helpful conversations, we decided to hold off on applying for tax-exempt status until we were sure it was the right decision, and partnered with Playable Theatre as our fiscal sponsor for tax-exempt donations, as well as other resources for support, who we are still partnered with.
Additionally, we brought on the talents of Mytrice Allen, Dr. Rachael Cofield, and Tanner Rives to help our team. Tanner is now our Office Manager and will be managing human resources when we are prepared for that step, Mytrice is our Director of Content and Messaging, and Rachael is our Director of Programming and Operations. In May, Ashley asked to step down from the team indefinitely, after a huge professional opportunity, and we thank Ashley for being such an amazing asset to our team.
Now with a team of six, we began building programs.The rest of Q2 saw us conceptualizing the Consultant Education Program, a stretch goal we listed to pay for educational materials for our consultants, the NPEL(Normalize Paid Emotional Labor) Program, the initial goal we were seeking funding for to pay for more sensitivity readings, as well as a forthcoming podcast.
It was during this time that we also began to formalize and streamline processes, such as reaching out to our consultants for their opinions on agreed upon standards for sensitivity readings, and standardizing documents we send to clients and potential contacts. The rest of Q2 was spent with our noses in the books and paperwork. This is also when we began our monthly newsletter.
Moving into Q3 we knew we needed help balancing our finances, and had discovered that our 2020 taxes had been filed incorrectly. After resolving the issue with both the state and the IRS, we began searching for an accountant. Once again, our contacts at Playable Theatre made a suggestion, and we worked with Consulting by Numbers to figure out a strategy and organize our finances to better prepare for working with a CPA. We met with the recommendation the accountant made, and are now working with The Practical Accountant to prepare our 2022 taxes. After some research, we discovered that our business filings had also been filed incorrectly, and after talking with a CPA at The Practical Accountant, made the decision to apply for 501(c)(3) status after we corrected our business filings.
In addition to this, we hired an attorney with New Leaf Legal to help prepare us for the application process and manage the paperwork to ensure it was done correctly. Moving into Q4, we now had a team of six, a CPA to help us with our taxes, and an attorney to help with business matters. Though we currently have not received an invoice from our CPA, we are expecting $600 - $800 for his services. Fees for our attorney and the pending 501(c)(3) application totaled $1795. This will prepare us for become tax-exempt, have all our paperwork filed correctly with the IRS now, as well as for the future if we are audited or reach the IRS revenue threshold of $50,000 to have to reapply for 501(c)(3) under a much more arduous application process. We do not anticipate reaching that threshold in the coming years.
In Q4, we launched our Consultant Education Program, and plan to run it for Q4 2021 and Q1 2022. This program allows us to pay for up to $50 per consultant per quarter for educational materials or resources that they can use to help them with their work. At the end of Q1 2022, we will reevaluate how this program worked, take feedback from our consultants, and make changes to it based on that feedback and our own observations.
Not only did we launch the Consultant Education Program, but we announced the beginning of our quarterly workshops, a series of affordable educational workshops and seminars designed to help educate LARP Organizers and players on inclusive LARP design and practices. The first will happen on January 15, 2022.
In addition to the Consultant Education Program and Quarterly Workshops, we began writing documentation for the potential clients to apply for the anticipated NPEL Program mentioned earlier, outlining program details and getting preliminary approvals from our team. Though we were hoping to fully launch the program in 2021, we found that it was more important to launch the program with a strong foundation. This was the biggest goal for our April fundraiser, and we still fully intend to launch it soon, though we have no current date. It was more important to us that we do everything correctly, especially since a program such as the NPEL could potentially lead to legal implications if not handled properly. You can expect an update on NPEL in Q1 2022.
To finish out the year, we had two huge changes happen in November. At our Q4 board meeting, The board of directors voted to begin paying all of our non-board member volunteers a monthly stipend of $50 a month for their hard work. We founded LINC on the premise that all work, especially emotional labor, should be paid for, and up until this point, we have not been paying the people who have worked so hard to get us this far, other than our Discord moderators, who receive a $10 monthly stipend for their work moderating our discord community. After a unanimous vote, we instituted a $50 retroactive payment for the months of July - December for Mytrice, Rachael, and Tanner, and they will continue to receive that $50 stipend each month in perpetuity for their work.
Finally, Jeanette Esparza, our Chief Operating Officer, stepped down from the Leadership Team, citing her need to focus on her personal life for the time being. Jeanette will remain Secretary of the Board of Directors, and Lawrence and Chris as CEO and Chief Editor respectively will share her responsibilities until we feel ready to fill her position. Thank you for your hard work as our COO, Jeanette!
As of the end of 2021, we anticipate a balance of around $2900 and after all 2021 expenses are made. Our fiscal year ends on December 31st, 2021. There are already so many things in motion for 2022, and we will share our plans with you in January. Whether you are a partner, a donor, a friend, or just someone interested in what we do, we thank you for your support in our goal to make immersive roleplay more inclusive and diverse for marginalized communities. This has been an incredible first year, and as we move into 2022, we’re so excited to share more about our plans and programs. Please continue to share our work, follow our social media pages, and stay connected with us as we continue to grow, we can’t do this work without you.
Sincerely,
The LINC Leadership Team