I suggest you look past the fact that we both use the word "donation" then, Liz. (And grab your umbrella, as I'm going to rain another novel barely worth reading.)
NPR is a non-profit corporation. It was created by a federal law that was signed by congress and passed by the president (Johnson I think). When a federal law caused it into being, NPR was given a massive amount of federal funding to ensure it could remain viable. Like most good investments and business start ups, they ensured there was money not just to open, but to keep open the station. This included an endowment fund now worth over $200 million. As a non-profit donations to NPR are tax deducible and they are eligible for more grant money than you can shake a stick at (really, your arm will get too tired as you go through the list). They have been the recipients of the largest single donation in the history of our nation to a media producer.
While I doubt any of us would even say that Stop That Nun is really a cohesive unit (and legally it may not be), if you really want to compare Stop That Nun to NPR seriously, you have a huge step to take in terms of giving things a pass. Stop That Nun is none of the things mentioned above.
Stop That Nun is a defacto partnership in a for profit venue founded by two college students with with a budget of zero dollars. There has never been a formal budget, nor articles of incorporation or any other legal document (aside from location release forms and e-mails giving consent to act in films). An extremely poorly run for profit organization (like I said, if it even is such a thing, but I guess if you really want to say it, I wouldn't say you were wrong), there is no business model what so ever, mission statement or other common items usually found in any business. While there is a centralized web-site, it acts more as a host for message boards than anything else. There almost no discussion of the products of the company on these boards, it is unlike almost any other web board for a company on the internet. The company's operating costs are all paid for by the defacto members of the partnership; as I mentioned there are no formal articles in the group, but legally if we were to get in trouble, everyone involved with the group could be held accountable as when a group of people get together under a common goal they are put into a partnership by default.
I am using partnership in the legal definition.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PartnershipWith not a single viable commercial product (Microcosm sold less copies to the public than it did to the production team), the operating costs of the "organization" are paid for entirely by the partnership members from their own pocket. Much more like a bad dot com start up than a viable business, let alone a national non-profit broadcast news organization with a budget of over $100 million dollars a year. While I don't always like arguments of how scale changes things (many times it does not), if you buy into those arguments, or even if you usually don't, I think it very much applies here to just how dissimilar to the two organizations are.
We are not the same "business type" (if we are one at all), we are funded entirely different, our presence in culture (on the web, over the air, and everywhere else) is entirely different.
This post on the boards was nothing like NPR getting on in the middle of the programming or having talent actually stop their program to ask for money. This was us telling everyone that's a part of the partnership that if they want the partnership to continue they need to put in more money because Seth and I are not business men and never really thought this thing through. There has never been a single ask for money of an outsider to the group in any of the media we've ever produced; unless it's a sale price to own something.
This is nothing like a public broadcasting operation.
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