I agree that we should be sticking to the percentages stated. Even though charity is our number 1 goal, you cannot take funding away from other areas and expect the coin to grow.
I think we should cut the number of sponsorships down to 100 and ask people to personally sponsor the 209 that did not make it on the list. We can do a manual rewards system temporarily or just record the sponsorships and work out the rewards later.
We need to take greater care in determining the number of children to sponsor. One of the considerations is to account for a 50% drop in price at any point in time, something more sophisticated then a buffer system.
I agree, I think we should start planning to cut the compassion at least in half within 30 days if our price stays this low.
I also agree that we should "try" to keep the charity from exceeding the 10%, however only if it means that all of our other charities other than compassion are restricted by an equal percentage of cutbacks.
I dont want to see charity XYZ receive 100% funding for expenses that are thing like airfaire or pleasure, while compassion gets cut (which is $38 a month per child).
Yes, we need to be more proactive before we expand again. You cant argue that we didnt have a phenomal period of growth and thats how we got here. Then we had a phenomenal crash of 70%, so this buffer was almost working. I think if we did have the entire 6 month buffer complete, we would have weathered this storm better.
Live and learn I suppose.
And *after* I put this in, I received Gingers response (about terminations and insurance). It didnt feel right (before knowing this) to put in any payroll for myself for example (or the current IT expenses sitting on the desk). However in light of that response, if our price stays low for 10 more days, and compassion is being voted down, Ill consider starting to terminate the children (knowing about the termination insurance) towards the end of this month, entering a smaller compassion proposal, and putting in payroll. Let's see how the next 10 days goes and how our fast impacts our price and what God's outlook is on this.