For the past couple years, Fred Hsu has been our almighty CFO!  Thank you, Fred.

In 2006, we spent $6K/year.  When we started this year, our estimated budget for 2007 was $17.2K.  Our core budget remains $6K/year; if we have more capacity, we ship out more smile cards, and beyond that we participate in Google's 20:1 matching program for Adwords.

Number of unusual things are happening, though.  Here are two of them ...

First, smile card requests are going nuts.  Yes, we anticipated a big growth rate, but this surpassed all expectations -- with over 1800 orders fulfilled in the last month of July!   Eighteen hundred.  However, the project attracted a wonderful volunteer who offered to print smile cards for free, which not only cut down our costs by 20% but dramatically improved our printing quality.  Discounting all the underground gift-economy transactions that don't get measured on the ledgers, we are now looking at $10K/year budget.  We have also implemented a limit of 50 orders/day, to stay within that capacity, and have initiated a distributed shipping mechanism (with about a dozen folks at the moment) to build our capacity in a bottom-up fashion.

Second, we got a lot more money than we need.   $52.5K more, to be exact.  Good problem to have, I suppose.  Number two of our three core organizing principles implies that we don't fundraise; hence, the money that comes to CharityFocus are offerings of incredible goodwill.  Instead of a response to "What do you need?", they are unconditional gifts that say, "My cup of gratitude runneth over.  I don't know what you need, but please accept this as an expression of my gratitude."  So, it's a big deal to have more than you need.  It all started with $7500 gift, which yielded radical generosity experiment.  And true to our non-accumulation ethic, we plan to be even more radical with the rest of our access (stay tuned for more on this).   So yes, this means that we will be on empty by end of first quarter 2008, and yes, that will mean that I will still jump up and down when we get our usual supply of $1 donations!  Our security never was money; it has been, and will be, just one thing -- giving.

Fred, after analyzing our mid-year finances, remarks, "We're spending a lot on smile cards."   All of us in the room smiled. :)  Second thing we realized was that we're going to have to file taxes this year, for the first time.  So if anyone knows a CPA who can do some pro-bono work, we'd love to know about it. :)

Onwards!