News at 11

Hardest part of dealing with American companies seems to be that they usually don't understand (or don't consider that) things that are different from the US (UK companies seem more open to this, still)

The fact that nobody pays invoices with checks outside of the US for example, or that different countries have different payment methods.

Finally we slapped their logo on our site for the trip, added the tax we would have to pay on the money, then sent an invoice. As our tax consultant explained to me, they can reclaim the added tax through their own tax return, resulting in a net exchange of exactly 1000€- whatever the labour costs of everyone involved.

Now, this trip was not too bad, but possible complications are :

* What you get sponsoring for needs to be in proportion to the amount of money, leading us to need way more volunteers than originally planned just to deal with the overhead of the sponsor services in a career fair we organised * If you are tax exempt for charitable purposes, you need to very cleanly separate donation funded things from sponsorship or otherwise business funded stuff, because subsidising a lossy business is only rarely legal

German-cultured(DACH) companies get the idea of "give money as a donation because what they do benefits us" a lot more than Anglo-Saxon cultured ones, at least in my experience, which might be reflected in the law

It might be that the legal framework is there, but the process within companies is not. I'd be interested in someone correcting me if I misunderstood things

I think the critical different is that the sponsorship is for a specific activity, but I'm not sure.

There's certainly tax structure in place for donations in the US, but perhaps there is also a custom regarding sponsorship.