funding options for a website

[kiforgot]

I'm setting up a new bulletin board type website, and would like to know my legal options for membership funding of the website.

Options I'd like to look into would be donations, paid memberships, etc.

I'd like to also organize a monthly drawing, and would like to limit that to paid membership, but know that raffles etc are not legal unless for charities etc.

Is it legal to accept donations (unspecified amount) as a paid membership, and then restrict the drawing to that membership? If not, could I establish that all website members will get X amount of entries, and paid members get an additional so many entries?

The $ donated would be used not only to fund the website (web hosting fees, etc) but also to purchase items for the drawings, to be held once a month.

Could something like this work possibly? the website is small so far, with only 67 registered members, but our sister site at yahoogroups has over 600 members.

thanks for any help with this

 

[Michael Wechsler]

Your drawing seems to require money being paid for consideration to enter the drawing. This would put you in a lottery situation and would be a problem. As states differ with regard to laws governing games of chance, this is a challenging place to enter and you're best of discussing this with an attorney if you're hoping to run something of this nature. If you notice, many drawings say "no purchase required" - and that is for good reason.