After the United Way campaign at work, I’ve been looking more into charities and how they operate; I found a website called Charity Navigator a little while back that helps to evaluate how effective charities are and I’ve been using it more lately. If you look up a charity, it gives you a chart showing where their money goes (i.e. how much gets spent on fundraising and administrative costs). It also shows how much the CEOs of the organizations make.
What I found interesting is that the United Way of Rochester passes around 83% of its income to programs- this is pretty standard. However, since they’re a fundraising organization, the organizations that give to may also have to keep around %20 for their administrative/fundraising costs. So of your $100 donation to UW, it may be that $80 makes it to the recipient organization(s). Then the recipient organization(s) may keep 20% for their administrative/fundraising fees, so in the end, only $64 of the original $100 actually goes to programs. I could be wrong, but it’s an interesting thing to look into. In the end it’s not a huge deal, because good administrators are needed to make organizations effective, and they need to spend money to make money- It’s just food for thought.
On a side note, I learned that Thomson has a matching gifts program; it’s pretty cool because it effectively doubles what you give. So any Thomson West readers, check that out- you can use it for a wide range of charities and it’s pretty easy.