My spontaneous idea was to found a nonprofit for a Molecular Immunology Society and as soon as I began to research it I was devastated from the first moment. Fundamentally I discovered that you need too much money and too much of an investment in time, energy, and personnel for an unpopular cause, organization, or charity.
You need to advertise and these days that means setting up a website. If you are a newbie website then you won’t be considered a secure website by most search engines like Google so you become the low human on the search engine totem pole. Even if you are a secure website the search algorithms are tweaked every once in a while and if you have very few visitors to your website or think that you have optimized your search parameters then they can change overnight. Fundamentally you need advertising money and lots of it to be at the forefront of a web search.
There are very few self managing web sites where donations are automatically recorded and emails kept track of. Then there is the problem of producing relevant articles to satisfy existing donors and entice new ones to contribute money. It is hard producing unique articles which don’t eventually start boring your clientele especially if they have little detailed knowledge about molecular immunology. So you may successfully brand the nonprofit but won’t be able to maintain or attract much interest.
Social or professional networking is another tedious aspect which requires keeping in touch with current researchers and understanding what their research papers are about and how relevant their research may be. Often basic research does not wander too far afield of current research ideas and then there are those research subjects which probabilistically have a very low chance of yielding any revolutionary or new insights. So you have to hire a high level expert in the profession to do the research grant evaluations and just one expert may be overly biased in the field and not very competent. What you ideally really need is a handful of research experts to evaluate research grants and the articles which originate from the research effort.
My idea was to give scientific instruments to competent researchers in the field of molecular immunology but even here serious decisions have to be made on what form of immunology you will choose because immunology is broadly understanding how your body defends itself from various diseases such as cancer, allergies, pathogens, etc. and the list is almost endless.
To donate scientific instruments you have to keep current on what the most important ones are and this means keeping up on current literature and making contact with instrument manufacturers.
So how many humans would really be interested in donating money to fund scientific instruments for researchers in the molecular immunology field? Probably one in a million unless it is a rich patient who has come down with a fatal disease which seems to have no current cure.
Interest in the general public is miniscule and interest by big pharma is probably also minimal since most are interested in developing drugs which you become addicted to for diseases which are never really cured but where the symptoms are merely masked. Repeat customers is what big pharma mostly wants and cures are scary and devastate the bottom line or money earned.
Donating scientific instruments to basic researchers in molecular immunology is an idea with minimal public interest which translates into very few donors and fundamentally a bankrupt nonprofit. The nonprofit can’t stay afloat financially if run properly and is basically an unpaid labor of love if you want to set up a professional expert networking communications system.
I end with the IRS accounting system which is necessary for a nonprofit and this is also very time consuming and detailed which probably means having to hire a professional accountant if you can’t do it yourself.
Ideally a nonprofit should spend about 10% in administrative costs and about 90% should go to the charity. Realistically I now understand why popular charities spend about 90% on administrative costs and only about 5 or 10% go to the charity cause itself.
The conclusion is that nonprofits for rare causes are just not financially feasible unless you get a very rich donor or handful of rich donors.
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