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The Cincinnati User Group has been running strong for the last 7 months or so, and next month I am going to take the first steps to turn the user group into a legitimate non-profit organization. This might seem a little strange, but the big reason for doing this is to allow companies to sponsor the group and hopefully deduct those donations from their taxes (this requires some extra work but hopefully we can get this status with the IRS)

You might be thinking, why not just have companies sponsor individual meetings? Well, I have tried that and I find that companies expect an influence over that meeting. Sometimes they want to do a marketing talk, or they get offended when you announce things for other companies (like job openings etc)

You might also be thinking why I need to do this when INETA is around and when Microsoft and book publishers lavish user groups with so much free stuff. I definitely love all the stuff these companies and organization give us, but I also want to provide more for our group. I like to have pizza and drinks after each meeting and we need to find a long term way to pay for that, but that is just the beginning.

Being a non-profit and having a pool of sponsorship money will allow the user group to do alot of stuff that we wouldn't otherwise be able to do. Here is a taste of some of the things I would like to be able to do:

• Sponsor mini-conferences (Day of .NET, Code Camp, etc)
• Sponsor attendees to go to conferences or training. (How cool would it be able to send a frequent attendee to TechEd or a week of training?)
• Student Training Days – The idea would be to have an open day for college or high school students to come and learn about programming.

I am working with my accountant to get this all setup and it should be done in the next couple months. One of the groups that has inspired me in this is the IndyNDA which has a great sponsorship program that I will be modeling mine after.