Rhian wrote:Examples of volunteering:
technical support,
improving and updating the forum,
writing articles for the forum, lang profiles etc,
advice on creating trusts and not for profits,
advice on fundraising.
What do you mean creating "trusts" ?
Is it trust like in I trust you will answer or
a trust like the British Petroleum - the Goldman Sachs - the Mitsubishi or any other name ?
In case you are targeting the second kind - this is not a good time for an IPO.
Do you mean a third kind that I don't know about - never heard of not for profit trust.
My first advice about fundraising is to know how much do we need ?
A Gandi .org domain name is 16,80 euros for a year and ours is running up to may 2016. 17,35 euros for the next year - plus 7,20 euros if the person who pays the next year is not the one who paid before (as far as I understand).
I am not sure if we are hosted by Gandi too and in any case don't know what hosting plan we are in ? Gandi hosting costs between 2 and 16 euros a month.
I don't think we need more than the cheap plan - forum is text only that leads to less trafic and low needs - when we have videos - sounds or pictures we can host them for free on third parties like youtube.
So with Gandi our costs go from less than 50 euros a year up to a little more than 200 euros a year.
Do we need a domain name in the first place ? It is possible to have a free subdomain - like how-to-learn-any-language.ourhost.org. The disadvantage is to be less visible in the web search engines like google and to look less serious business in the view of the many idiots of our world - but since we run as a not for profit, who cares ?
To be less reliant on one or two people we need to share administrative access with more than one or two trusted people - back-up should be kept on the computers of more than one or two people. I have no idea about the size of the htlal.com full backup file.
If we need to pay something we need a payment system where more than one person can pay. Bitcoin for example - I am not an expert in bitcoin but I think if you have a bitcoin address (meaning account number) and its password you can pay from it.
There are other payment systems where you need an email adress and a password.
We could share an email account for that purpose.
That was my free 2 cents - for now.