aebrown wrote:I liked the earlier suggestion to have wards (meaning bishoprics) collect funds, and then pass them on to the stake. Or funds can be given directly to a member of the stake presidency.
I think that would be fine for a smaller local or regional event, but in this case, the conference gets a few hundred attendees from all over the country. Having their local bishops in their home state (not stake) collect funds is not practical.
There are definitely some varied responses here. I'm a bit surprised it hasn't been asked before. Certainly makes for an interesting discussion.
In my mind it boils down to this:
1. There are costs involved in running the conference
2 Those costs are passed on to the parcitipants
3. We want as many people from the entire country to participate as possible
4. We want to make it easy for them to do so
5. Nobody is making any money on this
6. Funds have to be collected somehow
A. A check can be mailed to my Stake/Ward for this and funds entered into MLS and the participant added as an out-of-unit donor to the "Other" category
B. People can use Paypal, put this on their credit cards, get airline points, and not have to look for an envelope (and of course, using Paypal drives conference costs up a few dollars per user)
B1: the conference organizers have an always-up-tp-date list of participants that have registered
Option 6B is what every other conference in the company seems to do but apparently it may bump up against some policy/accountability issues.
I appreciate everybody's thoughts on this.
