Two years ago I built a successful community of women executives who work in the music industry. The network has 1300+ highly engaged, highly qualitative members worldwide and we organize speaker events in London, LA, Lisbon, Barcelona, NYC, SF, Berlin and with various conferences around the world. The brand is recognized and respected in the music and music tech industries.
It feels like now is a good time to take a step further and make the community a sustainable business, however I'm torn between not-for-profit and profit. I'm a huge fan of the startup model and I would love to take that route, however I am scared that making profit a focus will take away from the community's authenticity. This is a community that has been operating purely with volunteers.
The other idea is to register it as a charity and aim for funding not from its members, but from collective crowd funding, brand partnerships, grants etc.
These are mostly strategic questions but I also have questions around financial and legal implications of registering the main entity in the US vs. other countries since our reach is global.
Your advice is much appreciated, thank you in advance!
/AM