 Approximately 45 proposed specialty license plates have failed to pass. During the 2014 Legislative Session, the Florida Legislature extended a moratorium passed by the 2008 Legislature on the prohibition of creating of any new specialty plates to July 1, 2016. This bill also revised the requirements for requesting the approval of a specialty license by replacing the scientific sample survey of 30,000 Florida motor vehicle owners and an application fee of $60,000.00 with a pre-sale voucher, requiring the pre-sale of 1,000 vouchers at $30.00, after legislative approval. In 2008, 5 new plates were created. Florida Tennis, Lighthouse Association, In God We Trust, Horse Country and autism. During the moratorium, 17 new plates were enacted, 15 of which were able to complete the pre-sell. The last 4 plates to be created by the legislature, effective 2014, were Fallen Law Enforcement Officers, Florida Sheriff's Association, Kaiser University and Moffitt Cancer Center. Since 2015, more than 40 new plates, including a proposed plate for Auburn University, have had bills filed in the legislative session. All have failed. In 2017 there were a total of 123 specialty license plates. Fallen Law Enforcement Officers (ranked 59) sold 6,950, Florida Sheriff's Association (ranked 76) sold 3,891, Moffitt Cancer Center (ranked 106) sold 1,235, and Kaiser University (ranked 118) sold 275. American Red Cross, Clearwater Christian College, Donate Organs, Pass it On, Hispanic Achievers and St. John's River specialty license plates have been de-listed for lack of sales in 2015/2016. Support Soccer has been de-listed in 2018 due to the sponsoring charity dissolving. The only way to create a new specialty plate now is to get a legislative bill sponsor and get a bill passed. Once passed, the DMV will require the design to their specifications and the voucher pre-sell of 1,000, as referenced in the document below. 
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Florida Licensing on Wheels vehicle HEADED to Gulf County, post hurricane - michael towner10/19/2018 GULF COUNTY, Fla. - Governor Rick Scott announced Monday the Florida Department of Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles will send a Florida Licensing on Wheels vehicle to Gulf County Tuesday, October 23rd..
FLOW vehicles provide driver license and other motor vehicle services to people impacted by Hurricane Michael. The FLOW Mobile will be at the Gulf County Tax Collector Office on North 3rd Street in Wewahitchka from 9 a.m. until 4 p.m. People who go to the FLOW Mobile can renew or get a Florida driver license and/or ID card. They can also replace a driver license and/or ID card, change a name or address on a driver license and/or ID card, renew a vehicle registration, renew or get a disabled person parking permit, and buy a specialty license plate. Soros Heir Is Offering Nonprofits Free Online-Giving Tools Through Give Lively - michael towner10/2/2018 Jonathan Soros, an investment manager who is one of George Soros’s five children, wants nonprofits to raise money online without spending on pricey software.
So, in a move that’s raised some eyebrows, he and his wife, Jennifer, founded Give Lively, a company that started offering free digital-fundraising software to charities a year ago. The company provides the basics: a way to generate donation forms for websites and emails. But it also gives charities the ability to raise money through text messages, the means to have supporters create their own fundraising pages, and, soon, a tool to sell event tickets. Nonprofits pay only a relatively small, but standard, payment-processing fee. The couple wants to save nonprofits money and deliver online-fundraising services that are just as strong as what’s on the market today — if not stronger, says Jonathan Soros, 48. Jonathan says he and Jennifer are not out to make money. Because the company offers free services, the couple — mostly known for backing liberal causes — sees it as a philanthropic project, despite Give Lively’s status as a limited-liability company rather than a 501(c)(3) nonprofit. Jonathan Soros likened the couple’s funding of Give Lively to an "impact investment," albeit one where no profit will be made. Effectively what we’re doing is subsidizing the entire field of nonprofits that use this product," he says. Most of the nonprofits that have used Give Lively so far are small. Still, some have recognizable names, like the Malala Fund, StoryCorps, and the Women’s March L.A. Foundation. The company might be one to watch if it catches on with lots more nonprofits, experts say. But many nonprofit tech consultants and people who work at competing companies are skeptical of its offerings. Civic Nation, which launched in 2015 and houses an array of advocacy and awareness campaigns, started using Give Lively’s donation pages starting in mid-2017, says Jenn Brown, the group’s executive director. The products are simple to use, she says, and "by far the best deal for our nonprofit." Today, the charity, which projects that it will raise about $10 million this year, uses the company’s text-appeal services and its tool to allow donors to create fundraising pages for campaigns. "As a nonprofit, my number one priority is to ensure as much money as possible is going toward the causes that people are donating in support of," she says. "So my priority is to work with online processors who charge us the lowest fees possible." To generate a profit, other companies that offer similar products to Give Lively's tack on fees — sometimes up to 5 percent, depending on the service being used and how large the nonprofit is, experts say. Most providers also ask charities to pay for a monthly or annual subscription, with the price based on how large the transaction fees are. By not asking for any payments beyond transaction fees charged by Stripe, a payment processor, Give Lively is a veritable unicorn. Its promise of free software is virtually unheard of in the nonprofit-tech space. And that’s made some observers skeptical. How can a software company continue to grow, improve its tools, and compete with the likes of Classy, Network for Good, and Blackbaud with only one source of funding and no revenue? "Seems unsustainable," says Sarah Sebastian, director of brand communications at Qgiv, a company that also offers digital-fundraising tools. Some have questioned whether there’s another agenda. For instance, is the company looking to hook a lot of nonprofits by giving away services, only to sell its company to another vendor? The answer to that is "no," DeParolesa says. "Our ethos is such that the idea of selling to a for-profit entity is sort of the antithesis of how we began," he says. In late August, the Soroses approved a company statement drafted by DeParolesa called the "Forever Free Pledge." The pledge promises that all Give Lively’s current services — and some items still in the works, like the event-ticketing tool — will be free in perpetuity to all users, with no commitments. "We will never charge any annual fees, setup fees, hidden fees, or platform fees for our Forever Free Services," says the statement, which went online in August. "We pledge to offer each of our Forever Free Services for so long as we run each service." A footnote at the bottom of the pledge says: "Stop trying to find a catch. There’s no catch." Give Lively has some limitations. The company can integrate its fundraising tools only with Salesforce. That means charities using other donor databases — like Blackbaud’s Raiser’s Edge — won’t get supporter data sent directly to their systems. They’ll have to download it and then manually import it into their databases — creating an administrative task that many charities don’t like. Give Lively will be investigating ways to work with other fundraising software this year, but DeParolesa is unsure how long it’ll take to offer such services. Today, nonprofits also need to use the payment processor Stripe as part of their Give Lively account. That service typically takes two days to verify credit-card payments for nonprofits. It takes seven days for contributions made by donors directly from their bank accounts. Among other reasons, the company uses Stripe because it offers good rates for processing nonprofit donations, DeParolesa says. Give Lively, however, will start allowing nonprofits to use PayPal as its payment processor later this year, which charges fees similar to Stripe’s, but can send money to nonprofits faster in most cases. Jonathan Soros acknowledges that it might be hard to get nonprofits that are used to doing business with other companies to join Give Lively. "The transaction cost of shifting is not zero," Soros says. Still, he thinks all nonprofits — no matter their size — care about saving money: "It really feels difficult to hand over a percentage of your revenue to anybody, whether you’re small or large." Michael Towner A test website for the Single Portal Initiative — a central electronic system that would allow charities to register in multiple states — went online Monday, announced state charity officials at a conference.
The new effort allows nonprofit officials to test the site and enroll their organizations to solicit donations in Connecticut and Georgia. Charities should be able to register with more states by mid-February 2019 during a second testing phase, said Chad Canfield, operations manager for the charitable-trust section of the Office of the Attorney General of Michigan. As more states join and charities provide their feedback, the site will be improved, he said. "What you see today or what you see tomorrow when you go back and look isn’t what the project is going to look like in six months or a year from now," Canfield said. The idea for the Single Portal Initiative has been in the works for many years, Canfield noted. The goal of the project is to provide a central online registration system for charities and professional fundraisers to fill out for their annual registrations in multiple states. The system would save charities time and money, officials say, because nonprofits would only have to enter in certain data and submit key documents — such as an informational tax form 990 — once. For many charities, the system would replace the bureaucratic labyrinth of completing applications — and often submitting the same documents — for multiple states. The test website launched Monday allows only charities to register, not third-party fundraisers — a feature the project’s developers expect to add. Other features they hope will come later include an analytics tool that will help charity regulators detect fraud and negligence, said Joshua Goldstein, vice president for product at CityBase, which is part of the development team on the site for state officials. State officials also want charity data to be automatically entered from the Forms 990 that organizations file with the Internal Revenue Service, he said. Currently, the test site has separate fields to enter some of the same data for registration in both Connecticut and Georgia, Goldstein noted — though the goal is for charities to enter each piece of information only once to register with many states. The bigger aim, he said, is for the registration process to become much faster. "If you’re a charity and you decide to register in a state, you should be able to complete that registration same day, if not same hour," he said, "and that’s our ambition." Michael Towner |
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